Seal-Paste Box with the Eight Trigrams
Original title
Unidentified potter (Jingdezhen ware) 佚名
- Institution
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗
- Accession
- 14.40.298a, b
- Credit
- Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913
- Rights
Public domain: made at Jingdezhen in the 18th century by an unrecorded potter. The Metropolitan Museum of Art releases this image under CC0 through its Open Access programme.
- Description
- A black-and-white photograph of a low, round porcelain box with a flat lid. On the lid the eight trigrams, each a stack of three whole or broken lines, run in a ring around a yin-yang disc at the centre; a band of fine wavy lines circles the side.
- Image
- 1600 × 1037
source file retrieved 2026-10-11 - Catalogue no.
- G-009103
coldlibrary.com/g/009103 - Credit line
- Unidentified potter (Jingdezhen ware), Seal-Paste Box with the Eight Trigrams, 18th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (CC0). Via Cold Library: https://coldlibrary.com/g/009103
A box for the red paste used with seals, made at Jingdezhen, the porcelain town of the imperial kilns, and painted with the eight trigrams of the Book of Changes around the yin and yang. Each trigram is three lines, whole or broken, so there are exactly eight of them, which is why Leibniz could read them as the numbers from nought to seven written in binary. The Met’s photograph of it is in black and white.
