Small bottle

The slim shape of this bottle is known in Chinese as liuye-ping, a reference to a willow leaf. All small objects with peachbloom glaze were well potted and fired to a highly vitrified texture. Different from the previous piece (cat. no. 554), both the interior and the exterior of this type were glazed in red. Notable is the wide, unglazed band around the outer foot, showing the refined trace of its wheel-thrown origin. On the base is a small recess for the mark, which was skillfully written with a refined brush. Because of the difficulty of obtaining the red color of the glaze, and because they were designed solely for imperial study halls, few of the peachbloom-glazed wares of the Kangxi remain, but they were reproduced in large numbers during the late Qing through the early twentieth century.