Bonsai pot precursors at the Shanghai Museum

My previous post mentiones Shanghai Museum. This remarkable museum strikes a balance. It’s not too big and not too small. It has things that captivate a child and an adult, a scholar and a layperson. It is not too academic and not too touristy, just perfect. My only “disappointment” was that their marvellous ceramic collection did not feature a single bonsai pot. However, they certainly had pieces that resemble them. Images above and below show ceramic containers which date back to Song, Tang and even Han Dynasties. Yes, these pots are one to two millennia old. Bonsai or penjing did not truly exist in those days, yet we find these ceramics that closely resemble containers used today for growing dwarf trees. 

Teapots at the Shanghai Confucian Temple

I rarely find laypeople genuinely interested in Oriental tea ware, but recently several of my friends and my own sister surprised me by their curiosity about Chinese teapots. This post is aimed to fuel their curiosity even further. Last January, I visited Shanghai Confucian Temple (aka Shanghai Wen Miao) which happens to have a superb collection of teapots on display. I photographed every piece I truly liked and left under the impression that I took way too many photographs. Checking them again this month, made me realise that they all can be crammed into one blog post. So here they are. Images below show some of the ‘purple sand’ ware from Yixing.

Images below show glazed teapots (porcelain, celadon and the like).

Images below show pitches, jugs or ewers.

Some of the porcelain tea caddies were exquisite (see images below).

Since this post is all about teapots I decided to throw in some images of teapots that got my interest at the Shanghai Museum (images below).

Jing’an Temple, Shanghai

During my trip to China this year, I visited Jing’an Temple located in downtown Shanghai. It is old and it had a complicated history, but today it stands tall and proud (see images above). For a person interested in Oriental art and culture Jing’an offers many interesting bits and pieces to explore. Being a bonsai enthusiast myself, I couldn’t help noticing a couple of feature trees growing in one of the courtyards. They looked well looked after and thoughtfully styled. Below are photos of the nicer one of the two.

The main hall or ‘The Precious Hall of the Great Hero’ is a beautifully decorated timber structure, which had one curious feature. All outer pillars of it were as shown in the image below right, however one corner pillar was different as you can see in the image below left. We are told that Chinese aesthetics favour symmetry, however in this instance the architect decidedly left a snag with a huge gall as an odd feature.

Bonsai production nursery in Shanghai

During my visit to China at the beginning of this year, I stumbled across a large bonsai production nursery on the outskirts of Shanghai. I haven’t noticed anything of quality or taste there, but the sheer scale of their production was impressive. Image ‘A’ below shows a raw of 17 hothouses. Images ‘B’ and ‘C’ show how some of them looked inside.

They also had a significant number of larger hothouses, which were not covered with plastic and images below show what was in them.

All plants there were just Podocarpuses, pines, maples and junipers. Images below show some close up shots of individual trees. Nothing special. 

Now I know where cheap bonsai come from.

Aztec suiban?

This ceramic square brazier found in Toluca Valley of central Mexico is dated between 1250 and 1521. Doesn’t it strike you as a suiban or a bonsai pot? In fact, some of the older Chinese bonsai pots were originally braziers with drainage holes drilled in them at a later date. Saw it at the Aztec exhibition in Sydney this month.