Calouste Gulbenkian put the final seal on his Chinese collecting, in 1947, with the acquisition of this very fine stem cup decorated with strings of miniature pearls, so fine they are only visible by lifting the vessel close to the eye. Fashioned from white, partly translucent porcelain with a bluish glaze of the qingbai type (literally, ‘bluish-white’), the cup has a double-walled body with delicate openwork consisting of four recessed panels containing relief figures of scholars among bamboo.

This cup is one of the qingbai porcelains decorated with pearls made for export from the late thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century. Qingbai ware was the first type to merit the designation ‘porcelain’, defined in Europe as hard, vitrified, resonant, white and translucent. This group also includes the famous Gaignières-Fonthill vase (Ireland) which can be dated to c. 1300 and is the earliest recorded Chinese porcelain to reach Europe.