China Learn

The Willow Pattern

The admirers and collectors of earthenware and porcelain decorated with the “willow” pattern are so numerous that its subject is so picturesque both in history and design.

Who has not heard the fascinating little poem:

“Two pigeons flying high,
Chinese vessel sailing by,
Weeping willow hanging o’er
Bridge with three men-if not four,
Chinese temple, there it stands,
Seems to cover all the land,
Apple tree with apples on,
A pretty fence to end my song.”

The poem and story of the willow pattern were taught me in childhood by my grandmother, who was born in Staffordshire in 1800 and was a great authority on matters connected with the potteries in her youth. For the information regarding the engraving of the pattern and its many varieties I am indebted to Staffordshire friends, and chiefly to an article by Mary Churchill Ripley in the American magazine Old China. Messrs Minton have supplied a replica of the plate which they believe to be the original Caughley design.

There are, I believe, several versions of the rhyme, but this is the form in which it was taught me by my grandmother, and never shall I forget the pride with which I recited it to a group of admiring brothers and sisters and pointed out to them the story on the plate she gave me.

Nor is the little poem the only story connected with the “willow” pattern; tradition ascribes the scenes depicted to incidents in the love story of a beautiful Chinese maiden.

Koong-Shee was the daughter of a wealthy mandarin, and loved Chang, her father’s secretary. The mandarin, who wished his daughter to marry a wealthy suitor, forbade the marriage, and shut his daughter up in an apartment on the terrace of the house which is seen in the pattern to the left of the temple. From her prison Koong-Shee “watched the willow-tree blossom,” and wrote poems in which she expressed her ardent longings to be free ere the peach bloomed. Chang managed to communicate with her by means of a writing enclosed in a small cocoanut shell which was attached to a tiny sail, and Koong-Shee replied in these words, scratched on an ivory tablet:

“Do not wise husbandmen gather the fruits they fear will be stolen?” and sent them in a boat to her lover.

Chang, by means of a disguise, entered the mandarin’s garden, and succeeded in carrying off Koong-Shee. The three figures on the bridge represent Koong-Shee with a distaff, Chang carrying a box of jewels, and the mandarin following with a whip.

The lovers escaped, and “lived happily ever after” in Chang’s house on a distant island until, after many years, the outraged wealthy suitor found them out and burnt their home, when, from the ashes of the bamboo grove, their twin spirits rose, Phoenix-like, in the form of two doves.