vase BM-1937-0716.74

Period:Ming dynasty Production date:1522-1566 (circa)
Materials:stoneware, ochre,
Technique:glazed, painted, slipped, underglazed,
Subjects:bird deity reptile mammal immortal landscape
Dimensions:Diameter: 220 millimetres (max) Height: 400 millimetres

Description:
Cizhou-type arrow vase with underglaze brown and overglaze enamel on a cream slip beneath a transparent glaze. This heavily potted Cizhou-type arrow vase has a compressed globular body and a long tapering neck with hollow tubes attached on either side by the mouth. Its base is recessed, within a broad low foot ring, and unglazed, revealing a dark grey stoneware clay body. Outside and inside the tubes and neck it is covered with a cream slip and designs are painted beneath the glaze in iron brown and a paler brown enamel is used over the glaze. Shoulao, the god of longevity, holding a scroll, is painted at the top of the neck, accompanied by emblems of long life – a spotted deer, crane and tortoise – with a ‘ding’-shaped incense burner on a rocky dais below. The Eight Daoist Immortals appear in two groups on either side of this with a key-fret scroll band below. Around the belly the same Eight Immortals are shown drunk and slumbering, collapsed among large vats of wine, some with ladles inside. Above this around the shoulders of the vase and repeated on the tubes is a distinctive flower scroll. A band of scroll motifs surrounds the foot.
IMG


Comments:Harrison-Hall 2001:As Isabelle Lee has demonstrated, such arrow vases were made for a drinking-game, called ‘touhu’, which had been popular among elite men and women from the Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BC). Players threw arrows into bronze or ceramic vases with narrow tubular necks at prescribed intervals, each player equidistant from the vase. The winner successfully projected all his arrows into the vase and the loser was forced to drink at each miss. Elaborate rituals and intricate rules, recorded in the ‘Li Ji’ [Book of Rites], added further complexity to the game. Puzzling pitching techniques were described in the ‘Touhu Yijie’ [Ceremonial Usages and Rules of Touhu], an illustrated manual written by Wang Ti (1490-1530), and these shots were given fancy names, like “A Pair of Dragons Enters the Sea” when two arrows were thrown from a great height at once into the vase. The ‘touhu’ game was used to practise archery, one of the essential accomplishments of a gentleman. Later in the Ming era, the game became more widespread and was played by rich merchants as well as the aristocracy and scholarly elite. A scene in the famous late Ming novel “Jin Ping Mei” [Plum Blossom in the Golden Vase], written in 1619, describes the wealthy merchant Ximen Qing’s seduction of his concubine Panjinlian. She becomes inebriated while playing ‘touhu’ on a picnic and the game leads to an amorous encounter.Two earlier arrow vases of this shape, made of bronze, were excavated from a tomb (M.13) in Pinghu county, Sichuan province. Archaeologists believe that the tomb belonged to the father of the scholar Wang Xi (1405-52) or to one of Wang Xi’s father’s wives. A number of bronze and iron arrow vases have been collected by Professor Jessica Rawson for the British Museum for future publication. The style of figure painting relates closely to that of blue-and-white wares of the Jiajing period, which were made at Jingdezhen.