Qing Dynasty? Porcelain dish

[BridgetownTreasures]

Hello! Total beginner here - I primarily collect rocks & minerals, but this piece was in my mother’s estate and I just came across it. Her hand-written note says: “Ching Dynasty Tung Che period 1862-1875”

Her writing is difficult to make out, and the phonetic spellings don’t help - but I’m guessing “Tung Che” might be Tongzhi since the dates roughly match the reign of Tongzhi.

It sure what this small dish is for. Too shallow for a finger bowl. Maybe a condiment bowl? It is roughly 3”x2”

The bottom is worn so I can’t tell if there were previously markings there or not.

Thanks for any additional info!

 

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[Red-Coat]

I would say the style is consistent with late 19th Century so it could well be Tongzhi. The issue with translating Chinese into our own language is that the character sets don’t match one another. Some people translate using the nearest equivalent letters and some translate using the letters that have the nearest phonetic pronunciation (hence variations such as Tung Che).

Despite the Chinese painting style, It’s not a traditional Chinese object and things like this were produced to suit Western tastes as export ware. It would probably have been sold as a trinket dish (sometimes as a pin dish). It’s not the ornate highly colourful decoration that would put it into the most desirable bracket for collectors, but nice enough.

However, there’s another issue. Dishes like this frequently had a ‘foot’… a little pedestal that raised them up like this (this one is Tongzhi):



The foot and the dish were moulded as two separate pieces and stuck together with clay slip before glazing and firing. I strongly suspect that yours once had a foot but it has detached, taking whatever marks it might have had with it. Either way, its value is now minimal I would think... and wouldn't have been significant even if intact and undamaged.