Chinese vase shapes: meiping, yuhuchunping and gu

The most common Chinese vase shapes have names of their own. The meiping, the plum vase, has a small mouth, a broad shoulder and a tapering body. The yuhuchunping is a pear-shaped bottle with a flared mouth. The gu is a trumpet-shaped vase modelled on a bronze wine vessel from the Shang dynasty. The hulu is a double gourd, the guan a jar with a short neck and the tianqiuping, the celestial globe vase, a sphere with a long straight neck. The shapes arose under different dynasties and can therefore help to date an object.

Facts

The shape comes first

Chinese potters worked in a tradition where the shapes had names, models and rules, rather like the orders of columns in European architecture. A shape could go back to a ritual bronze vessel, a gourd or a wine bottle, and it could live on for a thousand years with small changes. That is why the shape is often the first thing a connoisseur looks at, before the decoration.

The diagram below shows six classic shapes. Point at them to see the names. A vessel is also divided into parts and zones: mouth, neck, shoulder, belly and foot, with narrow borders between the zones. That division determined where the patterns went.

Meiping and yuhuchunping

Meiping means plum vase. It has a small mouth, a broad, rounded shoulder and a body that tapers towards the foot, and according to tradition it was made for a single blossoming plum branch. The shape became classic during the Song dynasty, when it was often made with monochrome glazes such as the green-gleaming celadon. It lived on in blue-and-white under the Yuan and Ming.

The yuhuchunping is a pear-shaped bottle with a narrow neck and a mouth that widens outwards, originally a vessel for wine. The name refers to a kind of wine. The shape is elegant and soft, and it is found in celadon, blue-and-white and copper red from the Yuan and Ming periods.

Gu and the bronze models

The gu is a tall, slender vase that widens like a trumpet at the top, often with a thickening in the middle. The shape comes from a ritual bronze wine vessel from the Shang and Zhou periods, more than three thousand years old. When later dynasties wanted to show their respect for antiquity they copied the forms of the bronzes in porcelain, cloisonné and stone.

The Houmuwu ding has the same background, a vast bronze vessel weighing 832 kilograms from the Shang period, with four legs, two handles and a mask-like decoration. The models from the Bronze Age are a common thread in Chinese art. In Europe the gu shape became popular in the so-called garnitures in the 18th century, in which three lidded urns were set between two trumpet vases.

Hulu, guan and tianqiuping

The hulu, the double gourd, consists of two spheres one on top of the other. The gourd was associated with Daoism and with long life, and it was popular when the imperial court favoured Daoism under the Ming. The guan is a large jar with a short neck and a broad body, for storage and as an ornament. Under the Yuan some of the largest and most lavish blue-and-white guan jars were made.

The tianqiuping, the celestial globe vase, is an almost perfectly round sphere with a long, straight neck. It belongs to the early Ming, in the 15th century, and was taken up again under the Qing dynasty, often with a copper-red glaze or in blue-and-white. It demands great skill, since the sphere must be perfectly even and the neck must sit straight.

Blue-and-white and the decorative zones

Blue-and-white porcelain, in which the pattern is painted in cobalt under the glaze, developed in Jingdezhen under the Yuan in the 14th century and reached a high point under the Ming dynasty, especially under the Xuande Emperor, 1426–1435. The blue-and-white vase with dragons in the British Museum is from that time: a five-clawed dragon, reserved for the emperor, winds around the belly. Where the cobalt lay thickly, dark spots formed, a hallmark of the period that was later imitated. See the same kind of vessel in the design section: the blue-and-white Ming vase.

The decoration follows the shape. On the neck there are often narrow banana leaves, on the shoulder a collar of ruyi heads, cloud-shaped scrolls, on the belly the main motif and at the bottom a border of lotus petals. Borders with meander or wave patterns separate the zones. Once you learn where the patterns usually sit, you see at once when something deviates.

Shapes that help you to date

A shape alone does not date a vessel, since the classic shapes were copied in every later dynasty. But it gives a framework. A celadon meiping points to the Song or Yuan, a copper-red tianqiuping to the early Ming or Qing. The emperor's reign mark under the base, in six or four characters, says which emperor the porcelain was dedicated to, but marks of earlier emperors were often put on later porcelain as a tribute; see the design section's guide to porcelain marks.

From the late Ming, porcelain was exported to Europe in large quantities, first the thin kraak porcelain and then, with the East India Company, Chinese export porcelain to Swedish homes. European manufacturers copied the shapes in tin-glazed earthenware, as in Delft. The difference between the materials is explained in the guide porcelain, earthenware and stoneware, and more objects are found under ceramics. The porcelain city lives on: Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds were made by hand by craftsmen in Jingdezhen. The periods are found in the Chinese thread.

What to look for

Exercise

Which vase shape imitates a ritual bronze wine vessel?