Chinese blue and white bowl with city wall design, Kangxi mark and period

A blue and white bowl painted in underglaze cobalt with a walled city among landscape, and carrying a four-character Kangxi mark on the base. Here the mark and the pot agree: the cobalt is the deep, slightly violet blue of the Kangxi kilns, applied in the graded washes that period painters used to build depth in a single colour, and the potting is even and thin.

Underglaze blue is painted onto the unfired body and then covered with glaze, so the pigment sits under the surface and bleeds fractionally into it. That bleed is one of the four things worth looking at on any mark — a line with perfectly crisp edges is usually later, and sometimes overglaze.

Kangxi mark and period, in context

“Mark and period” is a formal museum category, used by the Met, Cleveland and the V&A in their own period fields, and it means one thing: the piece carries the reign mark of Kangxi and was made in the Kangxi reign (1662–1722). The mark and the object agree. That is a claim we make about very few pieces, because most marked Chinese porcelain is marked with an earlier reign as a matter of homage, and because Kangxi reign marks are themselves rare on early Kangxi wares and cluster late in the reign.

What makes the case here is not the mark but everything else: the deep, slightly violet cobalt the Metropolitan Museum describes as sapphire-like, the graded fenshui washes that the V&A notes as a Kangxi technique, the thin even potting and the finish of the foot. The Kangxi reign opened the Qing golden age — the imperial factory came back under court direction in 1683 — and a bowl on which the mark and the pot agree is the benchmark against which apocryphally marked pieces are judged. This was the second most-visited object on our old site, and the one whose old URL wrongly called it “signed”.

Read more: mark and period, or apocryphal? and Qing porcelain.