Ashmolean Eastern Art Online, Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art

The conical bowl has an angle below the rim, with a groove on the outside below the flared lip, and another angle above the nearly solid, straight-cut foot, which shows a very shallow footring. The piece is made of nearly black-firing stoneware, covered with a glossy brownish black glaze which stops at the angle outside, leaving the lowest part exposed in the biscuit. It has faint brownish ‘hare’s fur’ markings at the rims both inside and out. The rim is bound in silver, and the inside is painted in silver with the wish shou shan fu hai (‘mountains of longevity, oceans of happiness’ or ‘longevity [eternal as] the mountains, happiness [vast as] the oceans’), each character enclosed in a lobed medallion on a ground of dense vertical stripes and with a small stylized floret in the centre. The silver is largely rubbed and remaining only as a matt ‘ghost’.

The conical bowl has an angle below the rim, with a groove on the outside below the flared lip, and another angle above the nearly solid, straight-cut foot, which shows a very shallow footring. The piece is made of nearly black-firing stoneware, covered with a glossy brownish black glaze which stops at the angle outside, leaving the lowest part exposed in the biscuit. It has faint brownish ‘hare’s fur’ markings at the rims both inside and out. The rim is bound in silver, and the inside is painted in silver with the wish shou shan fu hai (‘mountains of longevity, oceans of happiness’ or ‘longevity [eternal as] the mountains, happiness [vast as] the oceans’), each character enclosed in a lobed medallion on a ground of dense vertical stripes and with a small stylized floret in the centre. The silver is largely rubbed and remaining only as a matt ‘ghost’.