The Liaoning Provincial Museum recently welcomed a special group of visitors — designers from the Liaoning Fashion Designers Association. They made a special trip to view the museum’s signature treasure, a National First-Class Cultural Relic: the Yuan Dynasty Blue-and-White Octagonal Jar with Pine, Bamboo and Plum Blossom Design, hoping to extract elements from it for designing qipao dresses.

The Yuan Dynasty Blue-and-White Octagonal Jar with Pine, Bamboo and Plum Design housed in the Liaoning Provincial Museum is exceptionally rare in both form and size. Only two blue-and-white octagonal jars of the same form and dimensions have been discovered worldwide — one at the Liaoning Provincial Museum and the other in Thailand. This blue-and-white octagonal jar stands 39.7 cm tall with a rim diameter of 15.3 cm, featuring a neatly proportioned octagonal shape. The jar is glazed in a bluish-white glaze (qingbai you), with a lustrous, smooth surface; the blue-and-white decoration is rendered in delicate, elegantly subdued tones. The body of the jar features a ground pattern of dragon-tooth and orchid-grass scrolls (longya huicao wen), while within ruyi-shaped quatrefoil cartouches are exquisitely painted scenes of lotus ponds and motifs of pine, bamboo and plum blossoms (song zhu mei). This Yuan Dynasty Blue-and-White Octagonal Jar with Pine, Bamboo and Plum Design exemplifies the superb standards of Chinese ceramic artistry.

After sampling and sketching the patterns at the Liaoning Provincial Museum, the fashion designers produced exquisite blue-and-white porcelain-inspired fabric through a double-sided printing process. Finally, the designers created a series of elegant blue-and-white porcelain qipao dresses. Shenyang, as China’s Qipao Capital, boasts a long-standing qipao culture. This marks the first time qipao dresses have been designed using elements from blue-and-white porcelain artifacts in the collection of the Liaoning Provincial Museum.

Chinese and international models — including Qu Dina, the “Shenyang Qipao Culture Image Ambassador” — don blue-and-white porcelain-style qipaos and gracefully walk the runway at the Northeast City Football League (NCFL) venue and on the T-stage along the banks of the Hunhe River, showcasing the charm of interweaving cultural relics with fashion.