Collecting Mulberry China Cups & Saucers

Video Transcript

"Some other shapes you want to talk about when you are collecting mulberry china. The soup bowl here is a pretty standard size you can find. Conditions will vary because obviously they used this soup bowl a lot so you can see on this one that someone tried to repair this and didn't do a very good job. This happens to be the Korean pattern with a lot of crazing in it that you can see. So this particular soup bowl will not commend most amount of money because of the condition. But this is just an example I wanted to show you of the soup bowl that you can collect in the mulberry. Another thing that I wanted to talk about too is the handle less cups. You can also find mulberry with a handle on it but the earlier cups were in the form of a handle less cup and this is the tea bowl that goes with it. The tea bowl is something that they would take the mulberry cup and pour their tea into it and they would pour it into this sauce bowl. This is what they call like a tea bowl and they would cool it off here. So the handle less cups are really desirable today to collect and you will find them in as many forms and shapes. They have the same octangular corners to them and you will find that the sauce bowl which people confuse for berry bowls very easily because it is a very deep bowl. It is also called the tea bowl and what you need to look for when you are buying these, because people will say berry bowl. It's not. It's actually the saucer for your handle less cup. When you look at it, you can see an indent in here where the saucer fits and the berry bowl you won't see that. So if you pay attention to that detail you will know that you are buying a tea bowl that belongs to a handle less cup and saucer and not a berry bowl. That is important as far as price when you go to pick these out. Another thing to watch for because these are used a lot too is condition and you can see this has chips and crazing on the inside of it. Hard to get around in a lot of cases with these and you will find most of these the conditions is not good. There are perfect ones out there but this is what happens when you are putting hot water and tea in a piece like this and using it everyday. That is really what they bought these for in the early 1800's was to use them so you will find these in a varying condition and price will dictate on considering the condition of these pieces but they are very desirable to handle as cups and saucers."