NORTHERN SONG DYNASTY (AD 960-1127)

In his discussion of the current vase in Hare's Fur, Tortoiseshell, and Partridge Feathers, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 135-36, Robert Mowry cites a very similar vase in the Idemitsu Museum, Tokyo, which has a brush-written inscription on the base reading: Xuanhe yuannian wuyue ershiri suo zao, ('Made on the twentieth day of the fifth month of the first year of the Xuanhe [1119]'). The Idemitusu vase is illustrated in Sōdai no toji (Ceramics of the Song Dynasty), Tokyo, 1979, no. 74; in Chūgoku tōji: Idemitsu bijutsukan zōhin zuroku (Chinese Ceramics in the Idemitsu Collection), Tokyo, 1987, no. 530; and was also previously published by Y. Mino in Freedom of Clay and Brush Through Seven Centuries in Northern China: Tz’u-chou Type Wares, 960-1600 A.D., Indianapolis, 1980, p. 224.

A related truncated meiping is illustrated by Li Zhiyan and S. Kwan, Song dai taoci (Song Ceramics), Hong Kong, 2012, pp. 408-409, no. 168, where the authors cite another similar example of smaller size in the Beijing Palace Museum, illustrated in The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum - 32 - Northern and Southern Song (I), Hong Kong, 1996, p. 223, no. 201.