KANGXI PERIOD (1662-1722)

The scene depicted on the present dish is number nineteen from the Gengzhi tu (Pictures of Ploughing and Weaving).This series was first made during the Song Dynasty as a set of forty-five scenes, as part of the didactics of teaching princes and officials the necessity of sericulture and farming. In the twenty-eigth year of the Kangxi reign (1689), the emperor ordered the court painter Jiao Bingzhen to produce an album based on this series. In the thirty-fifth year (1696), sets of wood block prints were produced based on Jiao Bingzhen's album, comprising twenty-three illustrations of farming and the same number of weaving.