Chinese porcelain Ge/Guan crackle glaze double gourd vase, 18th–19th century

A double gourd vase under a crackled Guan-type glaze. The double gourd (hulu) is one of the most persistent auspicious forms in Chinese art — a rebus for blessings and, through Daoist iconography, for the vessel that holds the elixir. Made as a shape it is technically awkward: two joined bodies with a narrow waist, which has to survive the shrinkage of firing.

The glaze is the interest here. A crackle that reads as a deliberate net rather than an accident, over a body dark enough to show at the mouth rim where the glaze runs thin.

Ge and Guan crackle in context

Two of the most valuable wares in Chinese ceramics are covered in cracks on purpose. The Metropolitan Museum records of a Southern Song Guan dish that the cracks were “made to resemble the accidental cracks that sometimes occurred during the firing” and are deliberate; the Palace Museum describes Ge ware’s two-tone “gold thread and iron wire” crackle as its defining feature — and adds that Ge’s kiln site has never been found. Qing potters at Jingdezhen revived both glazes in admiration of the Song, and a “Ge/Guan-type” crackle on an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century vase is that revival: the crazing is the decoration.

The double gourd is one of the oldest auspicious shapes in China, a symbol of fertility and of the Daoist immortals, and a form that suits a crackle glaze because the crazing reads across its two swelling curves. What to look at is the foot: Guan ware’s signature is the “iron foot”, the dark unglazed body showing where the glaze stops, and the Qing revivals imitate it.

Read more: when the crazing is the point and Ge and Guan crackle wares.