Tea Corner

Willow pattern story or rhyme?

Those of us who were children in the 1950s or earlier will remember willow pattern porcelain tea and dinner services. Not quite sure of the social status of these – middle class, working class. However, point is, my grandmother used to recite a rhyme or tell a short, flowing story describing the objects and events portrayed in the design. Does this have any resonance for anybody ? Anyone recollect such a little rubric or even what the words were (if only in part) ?

This one is an old Staffordshire rhyme,

“Two pigeons flying high,
Chinese vessel sailing by.
Weeping willow hanging o’er
Bridge with three men, if not four.
Chinese temples there they stand,
Seem to take up all the land.
Apple trees with apples on,
A pretty fence to end my song.”

This one, author unknown, is but one lovely example of the legend in rhyme.

Legend of the Blue Willow

My Blue Willow ware plate has a story
Pictorial, painted in blue
From the land of tea and the tea plant
And the little brown man with a queue.
Whatever the food to be served
Romance does enter the feast
If you only pay heed to the legend
On the old china plate from the East.

Koong-Shee was a mandarin’s daughter
And Chang was her sweetheart, ah me
For surely her father’s accountant
Might never wed pretty Koong-Shee

So Chang was expelled from the compound
The beautiful alliance to break
And pretty Koong-Shee was imprisoned
In a little blue house by the lake.

The Dour old mandarin reasoned
It was time that his daughter should wed
And the groom of his choosing shall banish
That silly romance from her head.

While friends of Koong-Shee imagined
In symbols the dress she should wear
Her husband to be sat thinking
She should ride in a gold wedding chair.

He was busily plotting and planning
When a message was brought him one day
Young Chang had invaded the palace
And taken his promised away.

They were over the bridge when he saw them
They were passing the big willow tree
And a boat at the edge of the water

___________________________________

The Willow Pattern Plate

Betty in her kitchen broke a willow pattern plate.
I spoke to her severely, but I spoke a moment late
To save those little people from a very dreadful fate
Whose fortune’s told in blue upon the willow pattern plate.

Two blue little people come running, together
Across a blue bridge, in the sunshiny weather,
They run from a garden, where stands a blue tree
Above the house of a wealthy Chinee.

The one is maiden, the other her lover-
A blue weeping willow hang half the bridge over.
Behind, in pursuit, comes papa with a whip,
But they’re over the bridge, and aboard the blue ship

That her lover has moored by the strand of the sea-
With a shove off the shore, from his wrath they are free.
Now deep in the water their oars they are plying,
While high in the heaven the blue doves are flying.

To his blue island home her lover with waft her,
And there they will happily live ever after.

This is the story of the willow pattern plate,
So please be very careful-though it’s only one and eight-
And remember that you have in hand a very precious freight
When you carry from the kitchen a willow pattern plate.

- by Horace Hutchinson, Westminster Gazetter, Jan 1, 1912.

Many more versions can be found if you search on the web.

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