A carved dragon coils beneath a glaze the colour of sky after rain. Longquan celadon chased that single elusive blue-green across thousands of firings — and the names tradition gave it are held, still, in the atlas.
‘THE BLUE OF THE SKY AFTER RAIN’ — A COLOUR DEFINED BY LONGING AS MUCH AS PIGMENT.
Where the glaze pools in the carved dragon and scrolling peony, it deepens by a named degree: qing-ming, sky-blue; dou-qing, pea-green; yue-bai, the near-white of moonlight. The Chinese Color Atlas separates the measured, the attributed, and the poetic.
ONE COLOUR, HELD ACROSS A THOUSAND FIRINGS AND A DOZEN DYNASTIES.
From the globular dragon jar to the meiziqing bottle vase, the silhouette changes but the green does not. A palette is a relationship, not a list — the atlas records how a single celadon name carried across centuries of Chinese porcelain, with citations where they exist.