The Five Great Kilns of the Song: Ru, Guan, Ge, Jun, Ding

Pick up a Song bowl and the first thing you notice is what is missing. No painted scene, no gilding, no reign mark in underglaze blue. What is there instead is a glaze thick enough to pool in the throat of the foot, a crackle that has taken six centuries of dust into its lines, and a body you can feel through the wall. Song ceramics ask to be judged the way a stone is judged — by colour, surface and weight.

This guide walks you through the five wares that later connoisseurs raised above all others: what each one is, where it was made, what its diagnostic surface looks like, which of the five is least secure as a category, what the list wrongly leaves out, and what to check on the foot before you buy anything sold under these names.

A Ming list, not a Song institution

The phrase wu da mingyao, the five great kilns, is a piece of connoisseurship rather than a piece of administration. No Song official drew up the group. It crystallised in Ming writing on antiques, when collectors ranking what had survived settled on Ru, Guan, Ge, Jun and Ding, and later Qing catalogues repeated the list until it hardened into orthodoxy.

Two consequences follow. First, the list reflects what a Ming scholar could see and buy, which is not the same as what the Song court actually used in quantity. Second, one member of the group — Ge — has never been tied to a kiln site at all, and survives as a description of a surface rather than a place. Hold the list loosely. It is a reliable map of taste and an unreliable map of production.

Ru: the shortest imperial run

Ru ware was made at Qingliangsi in Baofeng county, Henan, for a short period at the end of the Northern Song, and the kiln site was only identified and excavated in the late twentieth century. The glaze is a pale blue-green, sometimes described as the colour of the sky after rain, opaque and soft in the way it takes light. Shapes are plain: brush washers, narcissus bowls, small dishes, bottle vases.

The diagnostic is underneath. Ru pieces were fired standing on small spurs so that the glaze could run over the whole foot, leaving three or five tiny unglazed points the size and colour of sesame seeds. If a piece offered as Ru has a wiped, unglazed footring instead, the claim is already in trouble.

The surviving heirloom corpus is counted in dozens rather than hundreds, with the largest single group in Taipei and further pieces in London and Beijing. That scarcity sets the market: a Ru brush washer sold in Hong Kong in 2017 for a sum in the tens of millions of dollars, a record for Chinese ceramics. The detail is set out further in the guide to Ru ware.

Guan: purple mouth and iron foot

Guan simply means official, and Guan ware is what the court had made for itself after the Song lost the north and re-established at Hangzhou. Two Southern Song kilns are known there: the one below the Altar of Heaven at Jiaotanxia, and the Xiuneisi kiln identified at Laohudong. A Northern Song predecessor at Kaifeng is described in texts but has not been excavated.

The body is a dark grey-brown, high in iron, and thin. The glaze is thick, often built up in several firings, greyish blue to greenish, and deliberately crackled. Where the glaze thins at the rim the dark body shows through as a brownish line, and the unglazed foot burns a dark iron colour in the kiln. Collectors call this zikou tiezu, purple mouth and iron foot, and it is the single most useful Guan test.

• Look at the rim in raking light. The darkening should be a thinning of glaze over a dark body, not a painted band.
• Look into the crackle. Old crackle stains unevenly and in depth. Induced crackle stained with tea or ink tends to be uniform and sits on the surface.
• Weigh it. A thin dark body under a heavy glaze gives Guan a characteristic lightness for its apparent bulk.

Ge: the ware without a kiln

Ge means elder brother, and the name comes from a late story about two potter brothers at Longquan. Its signature is a double crackle, jinsi tiexian, golden thread and iron wire: a network of large dark lines with a finer, paler network running through it, the two produced by different rates of cooling and then differentially stained.

No kiln has ever been securely identified as the source of the transmitted Ge wares in the old palace collections. Scientific and archaeological work over recent decades has reassigned part of the group to Longquan kilns and dated other pieces considerably later than the Song. Ge is therefore best treated as a surface type with an open date range rather than a Song ware with a known address, and it is the category in which outright modern fakes circulate most freely. The crackle glazes of Ge ware repay study before any purchase.

Jun: a blue that is not a pigment

Jun ware was made at Yuzhou in Henan and is the one member of the five that is not a quiet ware. Its blue is opalescent, a milky lavender that shifts with the angle of the light, and it is not a colourant at all: the glaze separates into two liquid phases as it cools, and the resulting microscopic droplets scatter light. Copper added locally fires to splashes of purple and crimson that bleed into the blue.

Two features help. Glaze that has healed over cooling cracks leaves raised, wandering lines that Chinese collectors call earthworm tracks in mud. And a distinct group of heavy flowerpots and bulb bowls carries an incised number from one to ten on the base, where the larger number denotes the smaller piece — a sizing system, not an edition. The dating of those numbered wares is disputed, and archaeological and thermoluminescence evidence has moved much of the group to the early Ming. The Jun ware guide sets out the argument.

Ding: white porcelain fired upside down

Ding ware came from Quyang county in Hebei, centred on Jiancicun, and it is the only one of the five that is a true white porcelain rather than a stoneware. The body is fine and translucent at the rim; the glaze is ivory, sometimes warming to a soft cream, and it often runs into thin vertical trails on the exterior that collectors call teardrops.

The technical signature is fushao, upside-down firing. Stacking bowls mouth-down in stepped saggars raised output and reduced warping, but it meant the rim had to be left unglazed. Those bare mouths were routinely bound with a band of copper, silver or gold. A Southern Song writer records that the court found the coarse rims unusable and ordered Ru ware instead, which is as close as the sources come to explaining how Ding lost its place.

Decoration divides cleanly. Earlier pieces are carved and combed freehand, with a fluid asymmetric line. Later Northern Song and Jin pieces are moulded, with dense, symmetrical designs of lotus, peony, fish and phoenix pressed from a fired clay mould. Carved Ding is generally the more sought after. The white porcelain of Ding covers the sequence in detail.

What the list leaves out

The five kilns are the top of a taste hierarchy, not a summary of Song ceramics. Several wares excluded from the list were made in far greater quantity and are far more available to a collector today.

• Longquan celadon. The thick blue-green glazes of southern Zhejiang, exported across Asia in enormous volume and still the best entry point into Song taste. See the Longquan celadon guide.
• Jian tea bowls. Dark-bodied Fujian bowls with hare's-fur and oil-spot glazes, made for whisked tea and prized in Japan as tenmoku. See the Jian ware tea bowls guide.
• Yaozhou ware. Deeply carved olive-green celadon from Shaanxi, with the sharpest cut decoration of the period.
• Cizhou ware. Slip-decorated stoneware from the north, painted and incised, the liveliest and least courtly of the group.

What to check before you buy

Song wares are the most heavily reproduced ceramics in the Chinese market, partly because they were already being copied at Jingdezhen in the Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns, and those imperial copies are themselves valuable objects. Any judgement starts underneath.

• Read the foot first. Spur marks, the colour of the exposed body, the way the glaze stops, and the wear pattern carry more information than the glaze face. Work through the foot rim as a dating tool before anything else.
• Test the crackle for depth. Staining that has entered the body over centuries darkens unevenly and follows the deepest lines. Recent staining is flat and even.
• Distrust perfect condition. Undamaged Song pieces exist, but flawless surfaces with no wear inside the foot deserve scepticism.
• Ask what the piece would have been for. Song forms follow use. A shape with no function behind it is usually a modern invention.
• Expect the paperwork to do work. For anything above modest money, publication history, old collection labels and a documented chain of ownership are part of the object.

Common questions

What are the five great kilns of the Song dynasty?

Ru, Guan, Ge, Jun and Ding. Ru made pale blue-green wares in Henan for the late Northern Song court; Guan was the official ware of the Southern Song court at Hangzhou; Ge is a crackled ware with no identified kiln; Jun produced opalescent blue glazes with copper-red splashes in Henan; Ding made ivory-white porcelain in Hebei. The grouping was formulated by later Ming connoisseurs rather than by the Song state.

Why is Ru ware so rare?

Ru was made for imperial use over a short period at the end of the Northern Song, and production ended when the dynasty lost the north. The heirloom corpus that came down through the palace collections is counted in dozens. Excavation at Qingliangsi has recovered shards and some restorable pieces, which has clarified the ware without materially enlarging the supply of collectable examples.

What is the difference between Guan and Ge ware?

Both are thickly glazed, crackled grey-blue stonewares, and telling them apart is genuinely difficult. Guan has a documented kiln site at Hangzhou, a dark iron-rich body, and the purple mouth with iron foot that follows from it. Ge is defined by its two-tone crackle, the golden thread and iron wire, and has no secure kiln attribution or firm date range. In practice many museum pieces carry both names in their histories.

How can you tell real Jun ware from a copy?

Look at how the blue behaves. Genuine Jun opalescence changes with the viewing angle because it is an optical effect in the glaze, whereas a pigmented imitation stays flat. Check for the healed cooling cracks known as earthworm tracks, and for a purple splash that bleeds into the blue rather than sitting on it as a hard-edged patch. Then read the foot, the body colour and the wear.

Further reading

• Cizhou painted stoneware — the northern tradition the five-kiln list excludes, and a realistic place to start collecting.
• Chinese monochrome glazes — how the Song preference for single-colour surfaces carried into Ming and Qing imperial production.
• Ceramics and the Chinese tea ceremony — why so many Song forms are bowls, and what whisked tea demanded of a glaze.

Browse the collection

Song ceramics are a subject we write about rather than one we stock. The line runs on, though: the restraint that made a Ru washer worth more than a painted vase is the same instinct behind the ink masters of the twentieth century, who left most of the paper empty. Kiln & Ink publishes limited-edition archival giclée reproductions of those painters, hand-numbered and issued with a Certificate of Authenticity — you can see the full range in the collection.