Spring pot, a fine and delicate porcelain

Spring pots, a kind of classic porcelain of the Song Dynasty (960-1279), had been long popular throughout and after the time of the dynasty.

Evolved from the bottle filter of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), it was thin in bottleneck, a little retracted in the middle of its bottleneck, widening up in its lower part, curled at the bottom, and soft in its curves, constituting a symmetrical twin “S”. This style was fixed in the Song Dynasty as a wine set, and developed as a display later on.

Compared to the ones of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), the spring pots of the Ming Dynasty are wider in their bodies, longer in their bottlenecks and lower in their gravities. The first spring pots resembled the style of Yuan porcelain. It was not until the middle of Ming Dynasty that spring pots become fine, exquisite and smooth in their lines. The most popular spring pots were blue-and-white ones featuring cloud-dragons, flowers, birds and so on.

The name “spring pot” is said to have come from ancient poems, meaning to buy wine with jade pots. The word “jade pot” appeared before the Song Dynasty, meaning literally pots made of jade or white-and-blue pots that looked that jade. It was used to denote pureness and nobility, or the moon. The pots were used for numerous tasks, such as water clocks, wine bottles or lighting devices.

Being used together with “chun”, the Chinese character meaning “spring”, it became the name of a kind of wine, since people of Tang Dynasty associated “chun” with wine, as can be seen in many ancient poems and many names of wines today.

The wine was supposed to be popular within and around Jiangzhou District (current Jiujiang City, Jiangxi Province) during the Song Dynasty. The wine was popular for so long that the pattern of the bottle became familiar to people too, so they named the bottle “spring pot”. Experts think that the name “spring pot” came from the wine, but whether the style of the wine bottle was the same as the current “spring pot” is still unclear.