Mad in Pursuit Notebook
Chinese Porcelain: Treasure or Bric-a-brac?
My fish dish reveals its secret
It’s a question asked by every retiree looking to downsize and every child cleaning out the old homestead. Keeper or tosser? Garage sale fodder or family heirloom? Or a fabulously rare treasure that will knock their socks off at an international auction and solve your problems forever? (We all watch those stories of a $30 yard sale item going for hundreds of thousands at auction, right?)
Back into my collectibles head this week (and seeing one of those stories), I examined this 16-inch-long fish dish that I have treated like a thrift-store candy dish ever since Jim brought it home twenty years ago—one of his many fish gifts to me while I was in my fishing phase back then. A charming novelty in a house full of charming novelties.
I finally got around to turning it over to check the back. Ah, some writing.
Long story short, I was reminded that antique porcelain often comes with “reign marks,” which designate the dynasty (the Chinese tradition of dating their stuff). The Gotheborg website was helpful, giving me the mark I needed:
Looks like the dish is from the Yongzheng era of the Qing dynasty, 1723-1735.
So… I’ve been piling chocolate kisses on a 300-year-old dish. Should I rush it to auction?
Ha! Slow down. The auctions I've checked prefer porcelain from the Ming Dynasty—600 years old. Also, during the 18th century, China was churning out hundreds of thousands of sturdy porcelain pieces for the chinoiserie fad of European parlors and dining rooms. There is plenty of it still around. So, not priceless.
Then some other concerns arose.
The Gotheborg site indicated that most of the imperial reign marks are written in a square of 2 or 3 columns, rarely horizontally like ours. Furthermore, Gotheborg warns that most of the 18th-century exportware was not marked, but porcelain made for domestic use was. I'd like to believe that if mine isn't exportware, then it was bought locally by a tourist who brought it home to the U.S. Wishful thinking?
On to Google Lens. It revealed several near-matches—same shape fish plate, different blue designs, same reign mark on the back (either in a horizontal line or squared off). Most were simply selling as "vintage," with at least one referring to the reign mark as a signature. One shown on Chairish had a design clearly based on ours, but seemed more crudely painted. The seller admitted it was from the 1980s (despite the Yongzheng reign mark on the back—a blatant deception). Her close-up photos didn't show (and the description didn't mention) any surface crazing, which mine has. But, of course, craquelure can be faked as easily as reign marks.
I hate these caveats and ambiguities. I want to believe that my fish plate is probably 300 years old, not rare but venerable.
But the final nail in the Yongzheng coffin came when I watched a video about the foot rims of 18th-century porcelain (see Notes). Combs points out that the inner edge of a genuine Yongzheng porcelain would be sharply angled. Alas, mine is a gentle slope.
Sigh.
I look at it now—unchipped and in an unusual shape, definitely worth the $35 Jim paid for it. My research taught me a lot about looking at Chinese porcelain. My fish plate has morphed from disregarded candy dish to precious heirloom to conversation piece. In the end, our most priceless possessions are the stories. What more can I ask for?
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Originally written 7 Mar 2021; revisited and revised 7 Oct 2025
Notes
Dating 18th Chinese Porcelain by Foot Rims... by Peter Combs. [The foot rim is the unglazed portion at the bottom of a piece of porcelain that provides stability and serves as a point of identification.]
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