5 Yuan Bai Tao Gui (White Pottery Vessel)

The White Pottery Vessel (白陶簋) commemorated here is a type of ritual food container produced during the late Shang dynasty, roughly 1300–1046 BC. White pottery of this period was laboriously hand-built from kaolin clay at a time when the material's properties were not yet being exploited for porcelain — that leap was still centuries away. The Shang elite buried such vessels in tombs as prestige objects, and surviving examples are almost entirely from controlled archaeological excavations rather than the antiquities market.

This coin belongs to China's ongoing Ancient Chinese Artifacts series, which has drawn on museum collections including pieces held by the Palace Museum in Beijing.