The robust bottle, heavily potted with thick walls, is of ovoid form rising from a strongly splayed, unglazed square cut foot that surrounds a recessed base that displays a crack from firing, the shoulders rounding to the narrow neck with a flange beneath the everted mouth rim. Aside from the foot rim and base, the coarse buff stoneware is coated in a creamy white slip which received the dark chocolate brown boldly written characters in the main body zone and the abbreviated lotus blossoms above and detached vine scrolls below. The fourteen-character inscription reads: “For glory and wealth in the human world, there is a good drink of superb quality: it is wine!”
The flamboyant shape is characteristic of one type of wine bottle produced during Mongol rule in China during the late 13th and 4th century. Such vessels were products of kilns producing a wide variety of Cizhou-type wares in Henan, Hebei, Shandong, Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces. The exuberant and spontaneous style of painting and calligraphy on ceramic surfaces of the time are hallmarks of these domestic wares. Interestingly, while the potting is less than exemplary and the painted motifs and calligraphic inscriptions often done with wild abandon, the actual texts produced can be quite literary and sophisticated. Poetry, novels and drama were fields of dreams for Chinese potters wishing to attract the attention and patronage of the literate, as well as commonfolk who could well have known the excerpts from popular theatrical stories circulating at the time. In additions, proclamations and sentiments that everyone might understand, such as that appearing on the present bottle, extols the virtues of imbibing and the desirability of that beloved beverage, wine.
A Cizhou bottle same shape as the present and from a kiln known to have produced painted images such as those here was found at Guantai (fig. 1). A variation on the shape but exhibiting similar bold calligraphy, here the four characters conveying wishes for good fortune and prosperity is kept in the Cizhou Kiln Museum in Cixi’an (fig. 2). Such slender bottles with calligraphic inscriptions produced during the Yuan appear to be less numerous today and perhaps were not as popular many centuries ago as the stockier ovoid four-handled bottles, represented here by a bottle with a poem by the well-known Yuan-dynasty poet Chen Caoan (b. 1245) (fig. 3).
Fig. 1: Cizhou-ware wine bottle, Yuan dynasty, from the Guantai kiln, Hebei province, Pengcheng City Museum, after Cizhou yao guci, Xi’an, 2004, pl. 146, p. 83.
Fig. 2: Cizhou-ware wine bottle, Yuan dynasty, Cizhou Kiln Museum, Cixi’an, after Ye Zhemin, ed., Zhongguo Cizhouyao, Shijiazhuang City, 2009, p. 221.
Fig. 3: Cizhou-ware wine bottle, Yuan dynasty, excavated at Pengcheng, after Cizhou yao guci, Xi’an, 2004, pl. 139, p. 78.
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