Rice-yellow Glaze

The colour

Rice-yellow glaze (米黄釉) recalls cooked millet: a pale yellow touched with white, warm and understated.

Origin

According to the maker, its origins lie in an unintended change during the firing of Qingbai porcelain, when a shift in kiln atmosphere produced a yellow tone. During the Kangxi period, rice-yellow glaze began to be fired deliberately as a colour in its own right, with increasingly consistent results.

The link with Qingbai is a historical relation: it describes where the colour came from, not that rice-yellow objects are Qingbai.