Chinese porcelain Ge/Guan crackle glazed arrow vase, 18th century

An arrow vase in the Ge manner, the glaze crackled and stained so that the wider fissures read darker than the fine ones — the effect known in the Chinese literature as gold thread and iron wire. The crackle is deliberate: a controlled flaw, produced by the glaze and body shrinking at different rates on cooling, and prized rather than tolerated.

The arrow vase form (touhu) derives from a drinking game in which arrows were pitched into a narrow-necked jar. By the Qing it had long been ornamental. Ge and Guan wares are among the hardest Chinese ceramics to place precisely, because the type was made continuously in imitation of Song originals from the Ming onward; this piece is catalogued as eighteenth century.

Ge and Guan crackle in context

The arrow vase, touhu, takes its form from the vessel used in the ancient game of pitch-pot, in which guests threw arrows into a narrow-necked jar — the tubular lugs at the neck are the giveaway. As with the tripod censer and the ritual bronze shapes, it is a deliberately archaic form, and a Ge/Guan-type crackle glaze completes the quotation: Guan was the Southern Song court ware of Hangzhou, whose deliberate crackle the Metropolitan Museum documents, and Ge its more mysterious cousin, whose kiln site the Palace Museum says has never been discovered.

The Kangxi and Yongzheng kilns at Jingdezhen revived these glazes with real technical skill, and the British Museum notes that most Qing copies of Song celadons carry six-character seal marks though a number are unmarked. What identifies the family is the foot: the dark “iron foot” where the glaze stops, imitated from the Song originals. The crazing here is the decoration, not damage.

Read more: when the crazing is the point and the Song wares these glazes quote.