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In August she spent another month in Kunming, the capital of the mountainous Yunnan province, followed by a brief sojourn in Jingdezhen, the “Porcelain Capital” of China, where she studied ceramics.

Wedgwood’s white whale was porcelain, or “white gold”: the delicate import, most famously from Jingdezhen, China, that was ardently collected by European royalty, decorating a pavilion for Louis XIV’s extramarital trysts at Versailles and a Polish king’s palace in Dresden.

This month, for example, hundreds of home buyers in Jingdezhen, a ceramics-making city in southern China, organized protests over fears that Evergrande would collapse before it finished handing over legal ownership of their apartments.

After the protests in Jingdezhen, a social media page operated by a nearby county government carried warnings that the home buyers could be arrested for demonstrating.

The Yongle court was known to have ushered in a new style to the porcelain kilns in the city of Jingdezhen, and the bowl is a quintessential Yongle product, according to Sotheby’s.