The jar rises from a flat base with beveled edge, the narrow lower reaches swelling to a full rounded balloon-like upper body, the rounded shoulder incurving to a simple circular mouth with narrow slightly inturned rim. A minutely crackled glaze, clear, colorless but slightly cool in tone covers the upper two thirds of the jar ending in sweeping lines well above the base. The body is greyish white with a pinkish surface on the base. The ceramic was photographed with a recently fashioned koa wood cover.1
This unusual shape seems to be a transitional one between the standard bulbous jar shape associated with the Tang and the taller, sleeker meiping of the Five-Dynasties/Song period. At the same time it strikes one as being just like a Tang-dynasty amphora but one that has lost its neck and handles (fig. 1). However, it is clear that the mouth rim was finished and glazed when fired and there is no indication that handles had ever been attached to the body.
Because of the inescapable similarity to a standard Tang-dynasty amphora, it seemed quite an anomaly when we first encountered this vessel since we could not remember having seen anything quite like it, even though by then more than one had been published. A white ware jar of similar shape also formed without a neck surrounding the mouth, and with approximately the same type of glaze similarly applied, was excavated from a Tang tomb in Gongyi, Henan province, the piece published with a lid, suggesting that the present would have also been fitted with one (fig. 2). The Gongyi vessel is described as a green-glazed ceramic, reflecting the sometimes very cool tints of Tang white wares.
Another similar lidded vessel, though closer to an egg-shape, is in the Philadelplhia Museum of Art (fig. 3). A related jar in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is an earthenware vessel with green and amber lead-silicate glazes dripping on its sides providing another example of this rare form (fig. 4).
1. Our thanks go to Paul McCarty of Hilo on the Big Island for creating the koa wooden lid for our Tang jar.
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Fig. 1: White stoneware amphora, Tang dynasty, 8th century, Kaikodo, after https://www.kaikodo.com/art/a-white-porcelanous-tang-amphora.
Fig. 2: White stoneware jar with cover, excavated from a Tang tomb in Gongyi city, Henan province, 8th century, after Ceramic Finds from Henan, an exhibition jointly presented by the University Museum and Art Gallery and the Henan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Hong Kong, 1997, no. 13, p. 44.
Fig. 3: White stoneware jar with cover, Tang dynasty, 8th century, Philadelphia Museum of Art, after https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/40794.
Fig. 4: Sancai-glazed earthenware jar, Tang dynsty, 8th century, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, after He Li, Chinese Ceramics: A New Comprehensive Survey, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, 1996, no. 161.
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