Taihi Tenmoku Tea Bowl

One Bowl, National Treasure since 1953

Taihi Tenmoku Tea Bowl (玳玻天目茶碗, Taihi Tenmoku Chawan) is a Southern Song craft object owned by Shokokuji in Kyoto Prefecture, made an Important Cultural Property on 19 January 1931 and designated a National Treasure on 31 March 1953. The quantity is one bowl.

Twenty-two years separate the two listings. A listing in 1931 is among the earlier dates encountered here.

It measures 6.7 centimetres high, 11.8 centimetres across the mouth, and 3.5 centimetres across the foot. A bowl that sits in the palm.

The Pattern Appears Where Glaze Was Withheld

The Agency's record is specific about how the bowl was made.

The body is a hard, half-porcelaneous clay of pale eggshell colour, covered inside and out with a strongly lustrous tenmoku glaze of black-amber, over which an opaque straw-ash glaze is laid to form the pattern.

So far the account is of glaze added over glaze. The next sentence reverses it. On the inside, the straw-ash glaze is withheld only where the pattern falls, setting fifteen roundel motifs in a scattered arrangement with a band of scrolling foliage around them.

Withheld only where the pattern falls. Where nothing was laid on, the black-amber beneath shows through, and that is the pattern. The shape emerges from not covering, rather than from adding.

The outside works the other way. There the straw-ash glaze is sprinkled over the tenmoku to make a mottled pattern. Withheld within, sprinkled without: on one bowl the two surfaces are made by opposite means.

Excavated Examples Exist, Handed-Down Ones Barely

The assessment turns on an unusual distinction.

Examples of this ware have been excavated in China, but almost none have been handed down from early times, and one such as this, with the pattern well ordered and the glaze beautiful, is very rare, so that it has long been famous as a fine bowl.

Excavated and handed down are set apart. Pieces dug from the ground exist in China; pieces passed from hand to hand are few.

With the paintings of the six realms the point was that few examples survive, and around the imperial genealogy that old genealogies rarely survive. This record goes further and distinguishes kinds of survival.

Two reasons are given for the rarity: the pattern is well ordered, and the glaze is beautiful.

Former Owners Named

The record also treats how the bowl came down.

Around the middle of the Edo period it is said to have been in the possession of Ueda Saburoemon of Osaka, from whom Matsudaira Fumai obtained it and prized it as a work of the highest rank.

Two names appear. The sentence ends, however, with it is said, not with an assertion.

For the fragments of the Saigyo scrolls, owners were identified from a certificate of authentication and its counterfoil. Here no documentary support is cited, and the account is given as report.

The form is recorded too: the rim slightly turned back, the foot low and small in the tenmoku manner, the underside left unglazed, and a brass band running round the rim. Such a band is metal wrapped over the lip to strengthen it.

Seeing It

Shokokuji, in Kyoto Prefecture, owns the bowl. It is a temple holding, not an object kept on permanent display.

Ceramics are less vulnerable to light than paintings or documents, but occasions for showing rest with the owner.

Being a single bowl, the whole of it can be seen when shown. The fifteen roundels inside, however, are visible only by looking down into it.

Exhibition plans can change, so check before travelling.