Ru Ware Narcissus Basin
Unknown, Ru kilns · Late eleventh to early twelfth century, Northern Song dynasty
A shallow oval basin on four small cloud shaped feet sits alone in its case, glazed a soft pale blue that seems to change with the light, now green, now grey, now the colour of the sky after rain. It is entirely undecorated. There is not a single flaw in the glaze, not one of the fine crackles that cover almost every other piece of Ru ware in existence. It was made to hold a narcissus bulb and a little water on a scholar's desk, and it may be the most perfect piece of ceramic in the world.
Ru ware was made for the Northern Song court for only about twenty years, around eleven hundred, at kilns in Henan province, and fewer than a hundred pieces survive anywhere. The glaze contains a trace of agate, according to old texts, and it was fired in a reducing atmosphere that turned the iron in it this delicate blue. Look at the feet, at the rim where the glaze thins to a faint brown line, and at the underside, where tiny sesame seed shaped marks show where the piece rested on spurs in the kiln so that glaze could cover it completely. The absence of crackle means the glaze and the clay body cooled at exactly the same rate, which happened almost by chance.
The Qianlong Emperor loved this basin so much that he had a poem carved into its base and, misunderstanding its purpose, thought it was a cat's food bowl. It came to Taiwan with the palace collection, and the museum owns more Ru ware than any other institution, a full case of it in the ceramics gallery. Among them this uncrackled basin is the treasure. Give your eyes time to adjust and the colour will begin to glow.
Did You Know? Only one Ru ware piece without any crackle in its glaze is known to survive, and this is it.
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