Historically, Chinese people have believed that illustrations encouraged morality, discipline, and favorable conduct in children. This ideology gave birth to a generation of images based on child-rearing, with earlier works depicting fictional characters, such as those from Lie-Nyu Zhuan by western Han Dynasty writer Liu Xiang.
Currently, the earliest known porcelain pieces depicting children and women are: illustrations of boys holding lotus flowers painted using brown underglaze under a celadon glaze, and portraits of women on celadon-glazed forms painted with a brown-green underglaze, respectively. Although separate pictures of children and women were present on Tang Dynasty Changsha porcelain, the exact period in which both children and women are presented together in illustrations of child-rearing remains debatable. However, evident in the Yuan Dynasty is a multi-coloured vase preserved by the Saint Louis Art Museum depicting human figures, in this case an undressed child held by a woman, with another woman standing behind her1.
Examining (sequentially) the inclusion of illustrations associated with the promotion of ‘good’
