Very large blue-and-white dish. Probably Chu Dau kilns, Red River Delta, northern Vietnam, 1440-1460

Very large blue-and-white dish, finely painted under the glaze in a vivid cobalt blue with a single large peony flower in the centre and floral scroll in the cavetto. Probably Chu Dau kilns, Red River Delta, northern Vietnam, 1440-1460, stoneware. Diameter: 46 centimetres. Brooke Sewell Permanent Fund. Purchased from Eric Nissen. 2009,3014.1. British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Purchased from the Nissen Collection The large dish with the single peony was acquired by a European in French-Indochina (Vietnam) before the Franco-Vietnamese war (1946—54). His family kept it until 1979. The dish has three, small, evenly-spaced frits apparently caused by the dish having been hung on a wall by metal brackets in the owner’s home. It was sold at the British Rail Pension Fund in January 1979 and remained in that collection until it was sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong on Tuesday 16th May 1989 when the present owners Mr and Mrs Eric Nissen bought it. It was exhibited at the San Antonio Museum of Art 1986-1988. It has been on loan at the British Museum since 1999 and was exhibited at the British Museum as part of a display of Vietnamese ceramics in 2001.

An almost identical example is in the Ardebil Shrine in Iran.

Exhibition ; 2012 - onwards, Croydon loan,
2014 Sep-2015 Jan, BM WCEC, 'Ming: 50 years that changed China'