Qualla: Ru Ware

Ru Ware: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Fewer than 90 complete pieces exist on Earth. A medieval connoisseur described the color as "the sky after rain, glimpsed through a parting in the clouds." In 2017, a single brush-washer dish, just 13 centimeters across, sold at Sotheby's Hong Kong for nearly 38 million US dollars. This is Ru ware -- the most coveted ceramic in Chinese history, produced for the imperial court during a window of perhaps twenty to forty years around the turn of the twelfth century, and never successfully replicated.

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Ru Ware: The Color That Obsessed an Emperor

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ru ware belongs to the Five Great Kilns identified by later Chinese writers, but it stands apart from the others in its exclusivity. These pieces were made specifically for the imperial court during the Northern Song dynasty, likely under the personal direction of the Huizong Emp...

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Ru Ware: Sesame Seeds and Scholar's Desks

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The pieces are small and intimate: brush-washers for a calligrapher's desk, cups, wine bottles, incense burners, and oval planters for daffodils. Because the glaze covered the entire surface, the potters could not set them directly on kiln shelves. Instead, each piece was balance...

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Ru Ware: A Dynasty's Fall, a Kiln's Silence

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Production ended abruptly. In the 1120s, Jurchen invaders from the north overthrew the Northern Song dynasty, capturing the Huizong Emperor himself. His younger son fled south and established the Southern Song court, but the Ru kilns now lay in enemy territory. The workers disper...

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Ru Ware: Stars at Dawn

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Qianlong Emperor, who reigned from 1736 to 1795, described Ru ware in a poem as "rare as stars at dawn." He was a passionate collector who likely owned at least half the surviving examples, and he had poems engraved on their bases -- sometimes unknowingly writing on 18th-cent...

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Ru Ware: The Kilns at Qingliangsi

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The kiln site itself covers 250,000 square meters in the village of Qingliangsi, with kilns densely distributed throughout. First identified in 1950, the site was confirmed in 1977 when ceramic historian Ye Zhemin found a sherd that proved chemically identical to a known Ru piece...

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