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Lot Essay
This unusual bottle belongs to a well-known group of early blue-and-white cylindrical bottles which was inspired by columns in the Palace wrapped in dragon-rugs so that the apparently disassociated segments of the dragon's body on the rugs join to make a coherent design when wrapped around the column. These bottles appear to have been first produced in the last decade or two of the eighteenth century as an Imperial group - confirmed as in this example by the standard use of Imperial five-clawed dragons - and probably continued into the early-nineteenth century. A common feature of these "dragon pillar" bottles is the biscuit foot cut with concentric circles found here. This is a particularly rare design for the group, having as its decoration not just one or two dragons, but nine, the most auspicious of numbers as it was the square of three, the number signifying the male. This number was also associated with the Imperial family and Imperial architecture, nine dragons being a standard decorative motif representing the Emperor, as seen on the famous Nine-dragon Wall in the Palace at Beijing, and the standard use of nine bays on major structures in the Palace. Although dismissed in the past because they were porcelain and of the blue-and-white variety so common in the nineteenth century, this group is becoming recognized not only as Imperial, but as one of the earliest groups of Imperial blue-and-white bottles made for the Court. When they were made, they were the exception: it was this group that first made both blue-and-white bottles more popular, and created the fashion for cylindrical forms during the mid-Qing period.