Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Tale of Blue Willow China


One thing I love about working with broken china is finding out the history of the china piece that I'm working on. I recently received a request for information about a custom order and hopefully I'll soon be receiving this customer's broken Blue Willow platter. It's such a popular pattern but I've yet to have a chance to design anything from it so I'm looking forward to it. Plus this customer is also interested in men's jewelry which I also have wanted to do for some time now so I'm especially excited about getting started.

In talking about the china pattern, the customer sent along the story behind Blue Willow china. It's such a lovely story, I had to share it with you.

Once there lived a very wealthy mandarin who had a daughter named Hong Shee, who fell in love with her father's secretary, a man named Chang. To keep them apart, the father imprisoned his daughter in the palace. One day she escaped & the two lovers raced over the bridge to a waiting boat. They escaped, reached the boat & sailed away. A storm developed; the boat foundered; and the couple were lost at sea. It is said that two love birds appeared immediately thereafter - the spirits of Hong Shee & Chang, and live onto this day.


You can see the palace and the boat and the two love birds flying in the sky. I'll always think of this story now when I see this china pattern.

To see the final jewelry pieces designed from Blue Willow china, please click on this link.

2 comments:

ChezChani said...

Cool story. I sent the link to a friend who (if I remember correctly) has blue willow dishes. I love that type of pattern. I did some yard saling when I first came to Vegas and started picking up pieces. I had temporarily put them in my mom's dining room glass cabinet and now she won't let me have them back...I think I need to get yard saling again.

Jonara Blu Maui said...

Ooh how interesting. I had no idea china patterns had stories like that! I wonder how many other stories there are?