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Ming bowl

Ceramics
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A Ming bowl is blue-and-white or other porcelain from the Ming period, prized for purity and strength.

Detailed Definition
In the category of ceramics, Ming bowls embody classical Chinese excellence. In poetry, they ground reflections on history, utility, and enduring form.
Example
Example in poetry:
The Ming bowl — the blue and white porcelain of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) — appears in poems about the peak of Chinese ceramic art and the European passion for Chinese things; W. B. Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli" celebrates art's permanence against historical catastrophe, and a Ming bowl — surviving the dynasty's fall, the Qing conquest, the subsequent centuries — embodies the same argument; A poem about a museum's permanent collection might describe a Ming bowl: "it has outlasted everything that seemed more permanent than it — the dynasty, the emperor, the city where it was made"; The blue of Ming cobalt — deeper and slightly more purplish than Qing blue — gives colour poets a specific shade to work with; In a poem about trade and desire, the arrival of Ming porcelain in Europe is described as "a form of beauty so foreign it created a new craving — the Dutch merchants went back for more and more, and still could not satisfy the blue hunger"; A contemporary poem about a Sotheby's sale might describe a Ming bowl reaching a record price, its market value a strange, modern commentary on the nameless potter who made it.
Additional Notes
Ming porcelain (produced during the Ming dynasty, 1368–1644) encompasses an enormous range of types and qualities, from the finest imperial blue-and-white produced at the Xuande kilns to the vigorous, commercially produced export ware of the Jiajing and Wanli periods. The blue-and-white Ming bowl is particularly iconic: its clean, well-thrown form and precisely drawn cobalt decoration became the standard against which later Chinese and European potters measured their achievements. In poetry, the Ming bowl often represents ideal form — pure, authoritative, and historically resonant — as well as fragility and the pathos of survival across centuries.
Also Known As
Ming porcelain
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