Picture a jar painted the deep blue of a winter sky, its surface split by a web of sharp, uneven lines. Across those lines, small white plum blossoms open on branches that climb up and dip down. The cracks are meant to be ice. The flowers are left as bare white porcelain. Together they make prunus on cracked ice: a winter scene you can hold in two hands.
What is the prunus on cracked ice pattern? Prunus on cracked ice is a Chinese porcelain pattern of white plum blossoms set against a blue ground drawn to look like cracking ice. It was created during the Kangxi period (1662–1722) and made at Jingdezhen. The V&A suggests that a jar with this decoration may have been meant as a New Year present.
What You See
Start with the ground. It's a deep, uneven blue, and it isn't flat: thin lines run through it, breaking it into angular shards. One museum describes it as a "cloudy blue reticulated to represent cracking ice"; another sees "blue tracery in the blue ground, resembling cracked ice."
Then the flowers. They aren't painted on top of the blue. They're what the blue leaves behind: the blossoms are "reserved in white," the porcelain showing through where the painter laid down no color at all. Branches cross the surface in both directions, "ascending and descending," so the eye travels up and down the jar.
The effect is a contrast you feel before you can name it: straight, sharp cracks against soft, round petals; a cold blue field and small bright flowers scattered through it.
The One Thing to Know
This pattern may have been a greeting.
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London holds a covered jar painted with prunus blossoms and branches over cracked ice, and its catalogue says the decoration "may signify that this jar was intended as present for the New Year." It's a "may," and we'll leave it that way.
Chinese museum sources date its creation to the Kangxi reign: the Nanchang Museum, which holds a covered jar in this design, describes it as a porcelain decoration created in that reign. Its catalogue gives the recipe too: first a ground that imitates the crackled glaze of the Song dynasty's official kilns, then single blossoms or whole branches of plum painted over it.
So the "ice" has a second life inside it. It's an echo of an older ceramic surface, the fine web of cracks in a glaze, reimagined in blue paint centuries later.
The same museum also offers a reading of what the pairing means. In its words, this blue-ground, white-flower design brings out the character of the winter plum, blossoming bright and fragrant in the cold, and carries something of the spirit of Chinese literati painting. Read that way, the plum may stand for a flower that holds its color in the cold. It's the museum's interpretation, not a rule, and it sits comfortably beside the V&A's New Year reading.
How It Traveled
The first journey was through time. The crackle the pattern imitates belongs to the Song dynasty's official wares; the plum branches were added in the Kangxi era. One look back, one step forward.
Its workshop was Jingdezhen. The V&A dates one of its jars in this style to 1683–1710. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York dates its own "covered jar with blossoming plum over crackled ice ground" to the Kangxi period, 1662–1722. A third example, at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, also comes from the Kangxi years.
The Met's jar also carries a Chinese title, and it names the pattern directly: a Kangxi-period blue-and-white jar from the Jingdezhen kilns, painted with bingmei, "ice plum." The name sets the two halves of the design side by side, ice and plum, and keeps the pairing in a single word.
Then it went west. According to the V&A, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this decoration "became particularly popular in Europe." How porcelain made that journey in general belongs to the blue-and-white story; what matters here is that it became one of the Chinese designs especially popular in Europe in the age of chinoiserie.
In Europe, it picked up new names.
Did ginger jars hold ginger? In Britain, jars like these became known as "ginger jars." The V&A notes that the name stuck among British collectors, "though it cannot be proved that the jars were indeed containers for ginger when they were shipped from China."
Was it ever called hawthorn? Yes, but the flowers aren't hawthorn. Western collectors once called these pieces "hawthorn" jars; the V&A's own record of a "hawthorn ginger jar" describes it as painted with plum blossoms and branches over cracked ice.
The blossoms themselves never changed.
Why It's Still Alive
Picture a wooden window screen whose bars break into the same sharp, angular shards as the jar's blue ground. In Chinese window design, a whole family of lattices follows that idea. In his 1949 book A Grammar of Chinese Lattice, quoted in a 1977 paper by George Stiny, Daniel Sheets Dye noted that "the Chinese term this ice-line, or lines formed by cracking ice," and called it "a conventionalization of ice-formation which has become traditional."
Stiny's paper took those ice-ray lattices seriously enough to write down rules for generating them, treating an old window pattern as a design system that could still produce new designs. It's the same shape-making habit the jars show: take cracking ice, turn it into lines, and let those lines hold something.
The New Year reading travels well, too. Whatever the jars were first meant for, the V&A's suggestion that one might have been a New Year present is an idea that anyone who has given a gift at the turn of the year can hold onto. So is the Nanchang Museum's reading of the plum as a flower that blossoms in the cold. Neither needs a porcelain jar to make sense.
Your Pattern
The jars themselves belong to the porcelain painters of Jingdezhen; what can travel with you is the mood.
If the blue-and-white look has caught your eye, our Plum Blossom Cotton Canvas Tote and Plum Blossom Large Eco Tote are a different, simpler design: floral prints on a plain ground, with no cracked ice. They carry the blue-and-white mood into everyday use, and there's more in our blue and white chinoiserie bags.
Or keep exploring: go deeper into cobalt and porcelain in our Blue & White Porcelain Pattern Story, or browse every journey in our Pattern Stories.