Yuezhou Celadon Ewer

This ewer was unearthed around 1937 from a tea plantation at Kanakusahara, Kowata, in the city of Uji, Kyoto prefecture. This site is not far from the place where Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027) built his family temple of Jōmyō-ji, and presumably the cemetery of the Northern House of Fujiwara was located in the same area. That the ewer survived many years underground to be recovered in near perfect condition was probably due to its being a cherished item buried along with one of the Northern Fujiwara members. Characteristics like the form and glaze-tone of this piece lead us to think it was made at Yuezhou kiln in Zhejiang province, China, during the Five Dynasties or early Northern Song dynasty. The Heian-period narratives Utsuho Monogatari (The Tale of the Hollow Tree) and Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji) contain references to the term hisoku (literally ‘secret color’), and according to Kakaishō (The Rivers and Seas Commentary), a fourteenth-century commentary on The Tale of Genji, hisoku refers to a type of green-colored porcelain brought from Yuezhou in China. In view of the fact that that this celadon ewer dates from virtually the same era as The Tale of Genji, we can conclude that the Heian term hisoku refers to just this kind of piece.