[An Emperor’s Dream] How One Sentence from Emperor Huizong Inspired a Revolution in Chinese Ceramics

It is said that one morning, after awakening from a dream, Emperor Huizong of Song, Zhao Ji, issued an extraordinary command to the imperial kiln craftsmen:

“Last night I dreamed of a heavy rain just passing. The dark clouds parted, revealing a narrow opening through which the sky emerged. The color was beyond description. I care not how you achieve it—you must reproduce that very hue. ‘When rain has passed and the clouds part, let such a color be made hereafter.’”

The order left the craftsmen utterly bewildered. There was no color chart, no physical sample, no standard to follow—only the Emperor’s recollection of a color seen in a dream. How could such a thing possibly be fired in a kiln?

With their lives at stake, the finest craftsmen of the Northern Song Ru kilns at Ruzhou embarked on an almost obsessive quest for the elusive hue. Ordinary clay and conventional glazes could never achieve the dreamlike quality they sought: a surface at once like jade yet unlike jade, luminous yet restrained, translucent yet warm.

So the craftsmen resorted to an extraordinary solution: precious natural agate was crushed into fine powder and incorporated into the glaze.

The result was remarkable. The agate-bearing glaze produced Ru ware’s characteristic soft, subtly opaque quality, giving the surface an almost ethereal depth. More fascinating still, the color seemed to change with the light. At dawn, it could appear misty and subdued; beneath the midday sun, it evoked a clear summer sky. As the light shifted, the surface seemed almost to carry the movement of clouds and fading rain.

For Huizong, this was the very “sky blue after the rain” he had envisioned.

Yet the dream was short-lived. With the fall of the Northern Song dynasty, the imperial Ru kilns ceased production after only several decades. The elusive celadon hue of Ru ware became an artistic legend that could no longer be recreated in its original moment.

For centuries thereafter, Ru ware’s sky-blue glaze remained an unattainable “moonlight dream” in the hearts of emperors.

During the Qing dynasty, Emperor Qianlong—an ardent collector and patron of antiquities—became equally fascinated by Ru ware and ordered the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen to pursue its imitation.

The Northern Song original, traditionally associated with Huizong’s dream, was renowned for its agate-infused glaze and ethereal, understated beauty. Qing reproductions, although technically accomplished, often developed a clearer and more distinctly bluish tone, reflecting the refined, polished, and sumptuous aesthetic of the Qing imperial court.

The Qing imitations possess their own distinctive beauty. Yet one cannot help but wonder: no matter how sophisticated the technique, could later craftsmen ever truly recreate the otherworldly serenity and natural perfection of the color that existed only in an emperor’s dream?

Perhaps this is why “when the rain has passed and the clouds part, revealing the blue of the sky” has come to mean more than a moment in the history of ceramics.

It is also a metaphor for life.

We all pass through storms, darkness, and moments when the sky seems completely closed to us. Yet sometimes, through fracture, transformation, and the trials of fire, something unexpected emerges.

Just as agate was broken, ground, and transformed within the intense heat of the kiln, we too may be shaped by the hardships we endure. And when the clouds finally part, we may discover a color within ourselves that could never have existed without the storm.

May you, after every season of rain, find your own “sky blue after the clouds part”—the openness to embrace what comes, the resilience of warm jade, and the grace to accept life’s imperfections with quiet composure.