This small crudely moulded piece depicts a monkey, riding what appears to be a bear. The image of a monkey riding a horse was an auspicious symbol employed by Chinese artists to convey wishes for rapid career advancement – the pun on 'ma shang feng hou', meant ‘may you immediately be elevated to the rank of a count’. The combined significance of a monkey and bear, if the latter was intended to be such, remains unclear. Bears have been interpreted as the symbol of man, or when dreamed about signified the birth of a son. The constellation known as the Great Bear (Bei Dou) or ‘Northern Dipper’ also symbolised the Empress of Heaven (Tian Hou), protector of fishermen.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.
