DRAGON VASE - MELAKA's OLD ITEMS

Pottery embraces all earthenware items fashioned out of the moist clays, hardened by air-drying or by firing. Fired pottery becomes stone-like, furnishes some of the most imperishable relics of early culture.

Simple decoration by finger marks, and incised lines, pottery was improved by processes of burnishing, varnishing, enameling and glazing.

The potter's wheel, a small horizontal revolving table, has scarcely altered for the past thousands of years. Pressing the clay with hands, it rises in a spiral column between the fingers, to be depressed and again allowed to rise, when it is once brought down and centred. Then the pressing thumbs form a cylinder. With one hand outside and the other inside, the thickness is determined as the revolving mass soon becomes a jug or a vase.

Take a look at this Dragon Vase which is not less than a few hundred years in age.



Dragon embroidery is common where the emperors once reigned over China from amid the splendors of Peking's Forbidden City and dragon symbols were seen on the emperors outfits, table-cloths, chair-cloths, palace roofs, beams and pillars of the imperial courts and chambers, tea cups, plates, imperial swords, garden vases, palace doors, bedsheets, imperial carriages, chopsticks, bowls, ... so on and so on ... abundantly, and dragons on bridges above the rivers.