Porcelain dish

This dish was made at Jingdezhen in China where the potters began to decorate the local white porcelain in cobalt blue after 1300. Two cock-pheasants strutt among rocks and growing bamboo, grape-vines, and tropical plants, within a surrounding lotus-scroll border. Smaller items of Jingdezhen porcelain have Chinese shapes and may have been made for the home market. But large dishes such as this one were made for export back to the Middle East, where the cobalt for the blue had come from.