Chinese porcelain figures of seated boys, like these, have been recovered from trading ships wrecked in the South China Sea in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The ships were probably en route to the islands of south-east Asia, where the Chinese communities living there would have valued the figures as wish tokens for the birth of a male heir. These particular examples were probably bought by George IV for his sumptuous Chinese and Japanese interiors at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton.