Look beneath the blue

The Met records a Bowl with Eight Buddhist Treasures from early seventeenth-century China. Its medium is described as porcelain painted in underglaze cobalt blue, made in the Jingdezhen tradition. Start with those modest facts before adding a story of your own.

大都会艺术博物馆记录了一件十七世纪早期的中国“八吉祥纹碗”，材料为釉下钴蓝彩瓷，属景德镇窑瓷器。观察时，可以先从这些清楚的信息出发。

Underglaze describes where the decoration sits: beneath the glaze. Blue-and-white is therefore more than a colour pairing. The label points us toward a relationship between the painted design and the ceramic surface.

“釉下”说的是装饰所在的位置：在釉的下面。因此，“青花”不只是蓝与白的搭配。这个名称也引导我们留意纹样与器物表面的关系。

Try following a blue line with your eye. Where does it turn? How much white space surrounds it? These are prompts for looking, not a claim about who used this particular bowl or what its maker intended. A careful atlas can leave an interesting question open.

试着用目光沿着一条蓝色线条走：它在哪里转弯？周围留了多少白？这些是观察的提示，不是对这只碗的使用者或制作者意图的断言。细致的图鉴，也可以保留有趣的问题。

The museum’s object number is 17.122.2. That identifier is useful: it lets you return to the exact record instead of treating any blue-and-white bowl as the same object. The associated photograph is marked Public Domain by the museum; our written interpretation remains separate from its catalog facts.

这件藏品的编号是17.122.2。编号让我们能回到同一条记录，而不是把所有青花碗当成同一件物品。博物馆把相关照片标为公有领域；本篇的观察性解读与馆藏信息分别呈现。