Bleu de Huế bowl, marked base, 19th century

A bowl painted in underglaze cobalt with a dragon and a carp on a white ground. This is Bleu de Huế — and the first thing to say about Bleu de Huế is that it is Chinese porcelain, not Vietnamese. It was made at Jingdezhen to order for the Vietnamese court, first under the Lê–Trịnh from the eighteenth century and then under the Nguyễn (1802–1945). The name comes from Huế, the Nguyễn capital, not from a Vietnamese kiln. Almost every listing you will read gets this wrong.

The base carries a Nội Phủ (Inner Court) mark, a type recorded from roughly 1841 to 1883. The metal rim is period practice rather than a later repair: by the late nineteenth century mounting the rim in metal to protect it had become common on this material. A closely comparable bowl — dragon spitting fire among circular clouds — is in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Bleu de Huế in context

Bleu de Huế is Vietnamese, and it was made in China. The Vietnamese term is đồ sứ ký kiểu, “commissioned patterned porcelains”: from the later seventeenth century to the early twentieth, Vietnamese court envoys to China commissioned porcelain from Chinese kilns to Vietnamese designs, with Vietnamese reign titles, palace marks and poems in the Vietnamese Nôm script. The definitive account is Trần Đức Anh Sơn’s peer-reviewed study of 2018, and it is explicit that the wares were made in China to Vietnamese order.

That is what makes the marked base on this bowl worth reading. A Nguyễn reign mark, a Nội phủ palace mark naming a destination in the palace, or a Nôm inscription is doing honest work in a way that most Chinese reign marks are not. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston holds comparable nineteenth-century Nguyễn dynasty pieces. On our old site this was the most-visited object in the catalogue by a wide margin, which tells you how thin the informed supply of this material is.

Read more: Bleu de Huế is Chinese porcelain made for the Vietnamese court and Vietnamese ceramics.