DATED CYCLICAL JIAXU YEAR CORRESPONDING TO 1694 AND OF THE PERIOD

The composition of the vase takes from Li Bai’s (701-763) “Preface to Night Banquet Under Peach and Plum Blossoms”. One of the poetic scene shows a garden with numerous blossoms as lamps providing light on a misty evening. A bright moon adorns the evening sky as scholars sit around a table drinking wine and composing poetry with attendants and
ladies.

This subject was very popular during the Kangxi period and appears on a variety of high-quality blue and white wares, including on phoenix-tail vases and brush pots but it is rarely seen on square vases with copper-red decoration. Compare to an inscribed phoenix-tail vase similarly decorated with the same poetic inscription, in the collection of National Museum of China, Beijing, and illustrated in Studies of the Collections of the National Museum of China, Shanghai, 2007, p. 9, pl. 4