The Willow Pattern Plate

Each of the images at right seems to be a version of the same or a related scene. Each features a pagoda on an island, another island with a smaller dwelling to the left, a boat in the water, and a person or persons crossing a bridge. The two images are:

A scene on a blue a white porcelain plate from China (modern)
An illustration explaining a plate popular in Britain since about 1790.

The object carried by the person in the blue and white plate is not very clear, but in some versions it looks enough like a guqin (carried vertically, perhaps in a carrying bag) that, while I was living in Hong Kong 1976 to 2001, I could imagine this is what it was, or at least was intended to be. So I bought quite a few to use as dinner plates as well as to be objects of conversation. I also chipped quite a few, but they were also very inexpensive, considering they were porcelain: between US$1 and $2 each.

It was not until after I left Hong Kong that I discovered the British version, an example of which is shown at right. The image was copied from Wikipedia, which has several related pages. One is called "Willow pattern" (q.v.; alternately, "blue willow"), the name for this theme or motif . Another is about the supposed creator of the original British images on this theme, Thomas Minton (1765 – 1836; q.v.).

For the British version various tales were invented to explain the image. Most of these might be connected in some way to a version of the famous Chinese tale of the cowherd and the weaving girl, who are said to meet once a year on the Magpie Bridge (told here under the melody Qing Ping Yue). The common British version, however, is copied below from an article partly online under Project Muse, as follows.

The Story of the Story:
The Willow Pattern Plate in Children's Literature
Ben Harris McClary (bio)
a chapter from Children's Literature
Johns Hopkins University Press
Volume 10, 1982, pp. 56-69

The first known publication of the "willow pattern story" was in a British family magazine, The Family Friend, in 1849. The introduction asked:

Who is there, since the earliest dawn of intelligent perception, who has not inquisitively contemplated the mysterious figures on the willow-pattern plate? Who, in childish curiosity, has not wondered what those three persons in dim blue outline did upon that bridge; whence they came, and whither they were flying? What does the boatman without oars on that white stream? Who people the houses in that charmed island?—or why do those disproportionate doves forever kiss each other, as if intensely joyful over some good deed done? Who is there through whose mind such thoughts as these have not passed, as he found his eye resting upon the willow-pattern plates as they lay upon the dinner-table, or brightly glittered on the cottage plate-rail?

Appealing to the reader's sense of nostalgia, the writer, "J. B. L.," continued:

The old willow-pattern plate! . . . It has mingled with our earliest recollections; it is like the picture of an old friend and companion, whose portrait we see everywhere, but of whose likeness we never grow weary.

The commentator concluded, declaring the "story" of the willow pattern "is said to be to the Chinese, what our Jack the Giant-Killer or Robinson Crusoe is to us."¹

Contrary to J. B. L.'s last statement, the willow pattern was not a direct product of the oriental mind; it seems instead to have been a product of western interest in the East. The chinoiserie craze, which had been the province of the aristocracy, crested in 1760, according to Hugh Honour, but, filtering down through the strata of society, in its wane it left the lower classes infatuated by anything tinged with orientalism.² This interest prompted Thomas Minton, a Staffordshire potter (Wiki), in 1780 to devise a crowded oriental-patterned plate which almost immediately captured the imagination of the British public. Known as the willow pattern because of the centrally placed willow tree shown in blossom in spring before its leaves develop, the design soon appeared in imitation among the wares of other western pottery makers and, most historians of the art declare, was carried to China, where it was copied for the British and American export trade, shortly becoming one of the staples of that lucrative market. The evidence suggests that the story developed out of the plate design—rather than the reverse. Indeed, in nineteenth-century popular literature, one encounters several widely differing stories derived from the willow pattern plate,³ but The Family Friend version, through repetition, has become the story.

A child's rhyme of indefinite origin—but apparently predating the first prose version of the episodic adventure—seems to have been the first telling of this story. In part, the rhyme, referring to the willow pattern plate as "she," declared: 3

So she tells me a legend centuries old
Of a Mandarin rich in lands and gold,
Of Koong-Shee fair and Chang the good,
Who loved each other as lovers should.
How they hid in the gardener's hut awhile,
Then fled away to the beautiful isle
Though a cruel father pursued them there,
And would have killed the hopeless pair,
But a kindly power, by pity stirred,
Changed each into a beautiful bird.

Here is the orange tree where they talked,
Here they are running away,
And over all at the top you see
The birds making love always.⁴

By 1849 when The Family Friend published "The Story of the Common Willow-Pattern Plate," the design had become the stereotype of China in most western minds. It was a household feature as no other china pattern had—or has—ever been. This careful explanation of the "picture," thus, had a wide appeal and a ready audience among Victorian readers.

The story which J. B. L. wrote and illustrated with parts.... (Project Muse requires a payment to see the rest.)

The names "Koong-shee" (or "Koong-se") and "Chang" seem to have been made up for this story: I have not found any telling in Chinese that would put them into Chinese characters.

Likewise I have not yet found any evidence that the British version was copied from a Chinese original; and if it was inspired by a similar Chinese image I have also not found that. It thus seems quite plausible that the Chinese versions such as the one at top were all inspired by the British ones, many of which came to be manufactured in China.

After learning this, imagining that the person on the bridge is carrying a qin requires me to create my own story. Perhaps this really was someone carrying a qin into the countryside looking for a peaceful place to commune with nature. The Englishman who saw this thought the person must have been too lonely and, not understanding the qin, added two companions and invented a different story.

Footnotes (Shorthand references are explained on a separate page)

1. Willow Pattern Plate
This page is quite incomplete.
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2. Popular motif
It is difficult to say how popular (or well-known) this motif is in China. When I lived in Hong Kong the image with one figure crossing the bridge was popularly available there.
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3. Image
Images with the caricature of a Qing hair-style are generally not popular.
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