This pair of Japanese porcelain ovoid jars still contain traces of their original contents: saké. This alcoholic drink is made from fermented rice and has been known in Japan since the third century AD. The first jar is painted in underglaze blue with the ‘Three Friends of Winter’ (shō-chiku-bai): pine, bamboo and plum blossom. White slip (liquid clay) has been used to highlight the blossom. The second jar is painted with a bird perched on a rock beside a clump of chrysanthemums, convolvulus and grasses.

Queen Victoria gave four vessels of this kind to the South Kensington Museum (later Victoria and Alvert Museum) in 1865 (Mus. Nos 308– 311.1865). Two labels attached to those bottles read Safuran-shu (‘Saffron saké’) and Iyo Imaharu Edo uribiki Honchō I-chome (‘produced at the Imaharu Brewery, Iyo Province [modern Ehime Prefecture], Edo, Honchō I-chome’). They are almost certainly part of the same set. The bottles may have formed part of the gift received by Queen Victoria from Shōgun Tokugawa Iemochi (1846 – 66) in 1860, although saké jars are not mentioned in either of the two extant lists of presents.

Texted adapted from Chinese and Japanese Works of Art in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen: Volume II and Japan: Courts and Culture (2020)