Contemporary blue-and-white linglong vase from Azure Blanc’s collection, shown illuminated.
The little windows in rice-grain porcelain are filled with glaze. They begin as holes cut through the clay, but they are no longer open in the finished piece. Light passes through the translucent filling. That is how a cup can appear to have holes in its sides and still hold a drink.
This glaze-filled decoration is a form of linglong porcelain.
What Fills the Holes?
A Jingdezhen mug in the V&A collection provides a documented example. Its pattern was pierced while the clay was leather-hard: partly dried, but not yet fired. The mug was then dipped in glaze. After firing, glaze occupied the small openings, making them transparent. The windows were made as part of the vessel, rather than drilled into finished porcelain.
Were Real Grains of Rice Used?
The name is easy to take literally. You may encounter the story that rice was pressed into the clay and burned away in the kiln. The V&A record instead describes piercing the clay, as does the Wadsworth Atheneum’s label for a rice-grain bowl. The appearance of the pattern is not, by itself, evidence of rice as an ingredient.
Nor must the openings be simple ovals. A Qianlong-period bowl catalogued by Sotheby’s has pierced lotus scrolls filled with clear glaze. Here the technique builds a floral pattern rather than rows of grains.
Reading the Pattern
The contemporary vase shown here takes the pattern beyond little grains. Curved shapes and small petals form luminous flowers and scrolls along its body. In the detail below, a blue flower sits between the pale designs. The blue is painted decoration; the bright pattern becomes visible as light passes through.
This is why blue-and-white decoration and linglong work can appear on the same piece: one supplies painted colour, the other a light-transmitting pattern.
When looking at a piece of your own, try viewing the patterned area with daylight behind it. Look for the individual windows, then for how they join into a larger design. Open latticework leaves gaps; rice-grain work of this kind leaves glaze across them. The pale marks you first took for a painted pattern are places where the clay wall has been interrupted.
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