Green-glazed Pottery Barn with Inscription

Excavated in Yaowan village, Ganquan town, Hanjiang district of Yangzhou city in 1992, this glazed red-clay pottery piece is composed of two sections, an umbrella-shaped roof with crossed ridges and raised tile patterns, and a column-shaped storage room which expands a little bit in the lower part that sits on a cuboid base. There is a half-open window on the wall of the barn, coupled with a narrow terrace below. What flank the window are two vertical lines of inscribed Chinese characters in clerical script composed of sunken lines which mean “store grain and accumulate good luck” on the left and “keep the heavenly bird, namely, the phoenix, and bring fortunes while fending off misfortunes” on the right. The green glaze which covered the entire body the barn has faded maybe due to low temperature during baking except for the inscription, on which thick and lustrous glaze can still be seen.