This wine pot has the design of a lizard around its slender neck. The lizard is in fact the 'chi' dragon, a type of dragon with bifurcated tail that appeared much earlier on qingbai wares from Jingdezhen. The wine pot was in use at Dresden by 1721. It was a Chinese rather than European-inspired design, and was probably also a Japanese export. The design was copied by Bottger, the 18th century alchemist who derived the recipe for European porcelain under the patronage of Augustus the Great.Dehua, located on the southeast coast of Fujian province, is well known for its production of white porcelain, known to Europeans as 'blanc de Chine'. The earliest Dehua porcelain was produced as early as the 14th century but the production and quality of these porcelain peaked around the 17th and 18th centuries.
