Chinese imperial yellow glaze shallow bowl, Qianlong mark

A shallow bowl under the imperial yellow monochrome glaze, with a Qianlong seal mark to the base, on a carved hardwood stand. The shallow form shows the glaze at its best: it thins over the rim where the body turns, and pools very slightly in the well, which is exactly the behaviour you want to see and photograph.

The mark is in seal script (zhuanshu) rather than the regular kaishu of the earlier reigns — the Qianlong court used seal-script marks as standard. That is a dating tool in itself, and one of the reasons this piece is worth handling.

Imperial yellow in context

Yellow was the imperial colour. The Cleveland Museum of Art records that scholars generally agree yellow monochrome ware “was reserved for the use of the imperial household or served as diplomatic gifts” — hence the name — and that “imperial marks were permitted to be applied only by Jingdezhen workshops affiliated with the court”. Note the museum’s hedge, “scholars generally agree”: no sumptuary law is cited, and we do not claim one. What is certain is that the colour carried meaning, and that the Qing produced yellow-glazed table wares for the court in quantity.

The Qianlong reign (1736–95) is the most copied of all in the following century, and a Qianlong mark on a yellow-glazed bowl needs the same scrutiny as any other. The Metropolitan Museum’s formulation is the honest one: a mark helps to date a piece “assuming, of course, that the mark is not apocryphal”, which means the glaze, potting and foot are judged first. This bowl is the second most valuable object in the catalogue, and its mark and foot are photographed. Its old listing misspelled the reign as “Qianglong” in the URL itself; that has been corrected.

Read more: Chinese reign marks and monochromes.