Dish with bird amid bamboo design and foliate meander on cavetto

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This dish, decorated in cobalt on a white slip and immersed in a translucent glaze, is typical of the Hoi An shipwreck cargo, salvaged near Cu Lao Cham island, offshore from Da Nang, central Vietnam. It is characterized by freely drawn brushwork that displays all the hallmarks of mass production, a skilled hand executing the underglaze blue designs with a practiced confidence. Technically the Vietnamese kilns never produced true porcelain but rather a high fired stoneware. The discovery of the Hoi An shipwreck in the late 1990s demonstrated the massive scale of Vietnamese glazed ceramic production at its peak in the early 16th century.

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.

Metropolitan Museum of Art