The Palace Museum in Beijing, the National Palace Museum in Taipei, the Shanghai Museum, and several foreign collections house Xuande-era blue-and-red porcelain. This technique, combining underglaze blue with overglaze red, had not been discovered on any artifacts predating the Xuande period of the Ming Dynasty.
At the Palace Museum in Beijing and the Shanghai Museum, pieces such as the stem cup adorned with sea creatures feature underglaze blue depicting turbulent waves, while overglaze red illustrates dragons or mythical beasts. Fierce dragons and beasts leaping amid surging waves showcase the porcelain artisans’ exceptional artistic vision. The fusion of underglaze blue and overglaze red, broadly termed doucai (contrasting colors), served as a precursor to the mature doucai technique of the Chenghua era. In many ways, it was an epoch-making innovation. Before the Xuande period, though both underglaze blue and overglaze techniques had matured independently, it was only during Xuande that these methods were combined, creating a new craft of integrating underglaze blue with overglaze pigments. This breakthrough may have been inspired by Yuan Dynasty blue-and-white porcelain with underglaze copper-red (qinghua youlihong), where cobalt blue and copper-red pigments were applied beneath the glaze and fired at high temperatures in a single firing. In contrast, blue-and-red porcelain required an initial firing for the blue design, followed by painting iron-red patterns over the glaze and a second low-temperature baking.
Since achieving vibrant red hues with underglaze copper-red was extremely challenging due to its technical difficulty, while iron-red proved far more manageable, this obstacle drove master artisans to innovate. This novel technique ultimately laid the groundwork for the development of doucai porcelain during the Ming and Qing dynasties.
