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Lot *81
A LARGE FAMILLE ROSE 'NINE PEACH' BOTTLE VASE, TIANQIUPING
Estimated Value:
3.000 € - 5.000 €
Schätzpreis:
8.500 €
Description:
China, 19th ct.H. 55,3 cm
The vase is decorated with spreading, gnarled fruiting peach branches which rise from the base and bear nine large peaches amidst white and pink flowers.
From an old German private collection, collected before 1960
Peaches are perhaps China’s most auspicious fruit, having a long tradition as omens of longevity and harbingers of happiness, and flowering peach branches are believed to ward off evil. In the Shi Jing [Classic of Poetry], the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry, edited by Confucius (551-479 BC), the peach is used as a metaphor for thriving marriage and family. The poet Tao Qian (365-427) tells of a fisherman who, when following the source of a stream in a peach orchard - 'Peach Blossom Spring' - through a crevice in a rock, discovered a paradisiacal world. A peach orchard is also the setting for the oath of brotherhood sworn by the three main protagonists of the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of whom, the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) general Guan Yu, was deified and worshipped as Emperor Guan or God of War for near two millennia. The ‘peaches of immortality’, which are said to grow in the garden of Xi Wangmu, the Queen Mother of the West, flower only once every three thousand years, take three thousand years to bear fruit and another three thousand years to ripen, and are then offered in a banquet to the immortals. Dongfang Shuo, a witty and clever Han dynasty scholar, who became the hero of many legends, is reported to have stolen peaches of immortality and thus to have become immortal. And the same feat is told of the mischievous Monkey King Sun Wukong, hero of the novel Journey to the West, who subsequently was recruited by Guanyin (Bodhisattva of Compassion) to accompany the Tang dynasty (618-907) monk Xuanzang on his trip to India to obtain Buddhist sutras.
Small glaze frits or small chips partly old overpainted at the mouth rim, few very small enamel flakes
