A blue and white '100 boys' circular box with cover, Ming dynasty, Wanli mark and of the period (1573-1619).

Gustaf Oscar Wallenberg (1865-1937), Stockholm, and thence by descent within the family.

Gustaf O. Wallenberg was a Swedish businessman, diplomat and active politician. He was the son of André Oscar Wallenberg, founder of Stockholm Enskilda Bank (today's Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken, known as SEB). After a career in the Swedish Navy he turned to the business world and was active in improving the transoceanic shipping industry.

Wallenberg was Sweden's Envoy to Tokyo between 1907-1918. In April 1907 he travelled to Beijing to amend the Treaty of Canton (1847) between Sweden-Norway and China and to establish diplomatic relations between Sweden and the Qing Court. As the Swedish Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of Peking, he successfully negotiated and signed with Lien Fang, the Guangxu Emperor's High Commissioner Plenipotentiary and Senior Vice-President of the Wai Wu Pu, the Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation, between Sweden and China, which was signed in Beijing on 2 July 1908, with an additional article signed on 24 May 1909.

The collection was acquired between 1907 and 1918 when Wallenberg was the Swedish Envoy in Tokyo, and possibly during his diplomatic service in China. Documents preserved at the Östasiatiska Museum in Stockholm demonstrate the importance of Gustaf Wallenberg and his extensive connections with the Qing government to the Swedish engineers and businessmen who were in China during this period, such as Johan Gunnar Andersson, Osvald Siren, Orvar Karlbeck, Erik Nordstrom and many more.

Gustaf Wallenberg was the grandfather of Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg (1912-1945), an architect, businessman, and diplomat. Raoul Wallenberg has been designated by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among Nations, as well as having many monuments and streets named after him in honour of him saving thousands of Jews in German-occupied Hungary during the Second World War, while serving as Sweden's Special Envoy in Budapest. As he lost his father the same year he was born, he was brought up also by his grandfather Gustaf Wallenberg, with the Chinese porcelain collection around him, inheriting part of the collection when his grandfather passed away in 1937. He died at a time unknown between 1945 and 1947, further to his detention in Budapest by General Malinovsky in 1944, and arrest by the Soviet authorities. Further to his disappearance his part of the Chinese collection was deposited at the Östasiatiska Museum in Stockholm, and later released to the family.

Label to the base from Östasiatiska Museets Exhibition 1964. Lot no 68. Depicted in the exhibition catalogue and listed as from the Collection of Raoul Wallenberg.

Compare with a similar box sold at Christies, lot no 67. The Meiyintang Collection - An Important Selection Of Imperial Chinese Porcelains, 07 April 2011, Hong Kong.

Compare also a similar box sold at Christies, 1 June 2016 | Live auction 12555. The Imperial Sale / Important Chinese Ceramics & Works of Art. Lot 3322.

Compare with a box of this typ in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Credit Line: Fletcher Fund, 1927. Accession Number: 27.119.26a, b.

Another box and cover of this design, from the Qing court collection and still in the Palace Museum, is published in The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum. Blue and White Porcelain with Underglazed Red, Shanghai, 2000, vol. 2, pl. 181.

A number of similar boxes of this pattern exist in museum collections. A closely related box and cover is in the collection of Philadelphia Museum of Art and published in Ming blue-and-white : an exhibition of blue-decorated porcelain of the Ming dynasty, Philadelphia, 1949, no. 141; another, in the collection of Metropolitan Museum of Art, is illustrated by D. Leidy in How to Read Chinese Ceramics, New York, 2015. p.87.