纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 064大卫对瓶（5）（在线收听）

"Iran, and what's now Iraq, are the kind of areas where this sort of colouring comes in. This is a technique that comes from elsewhere, and therefore it tells us something about this period, when China is unprecedentedly open to the rest of Asia as part of this huge empire of the Mongols, which stretches all the way from the Pacific almost to the Mediterranean. Certainly the openness to the rest of Asia is what brings about things like blue-and-white, and it probably had an impact on forms of literature. So from the point of view of cultural forms coming into being, the Yuan period is extraordinarily important."And among the happy consequences of this cultural openness are the David Vases. The crucial significance of the vases is that as well as their decoration, they have inscriptions - inscriptions that tell us that they were dedicated in the year 1351, in fact on Tuesday 13 May 1351. It's a level of precision that's wonderfully Chinese, and it's proof positive that fine quality blue-and-white porcelain pre-dates the Ming. But the inscriptions tell us much more than that. There are slight differences between the inscriptions on the two vases, but this is the translation of the one on the left:

伊朗和今伊拉克地区是这种颜料的来源地。这种来自异域的技术告诉我们，当时的中国作为自太平洋横贯地中海地区的蒙古帝国的一部分，对亚洲其他地区采取的开放程度是前所未有的。正是这种开放为中国带来了青花瓷，也对其文学形式产生了影响。

就文化形式的构成而言，元朝对后世有着极为重要的影响。大卫对瓶便是文化开放的积极产物之一。除了白地青花装饰外，它们的重要性还在于瓶身的题字。借助这些文字，我们得知，它制造于一三五一年五月十三日，星期二。如此精确的记录正是中国特色的绝妙体现，同时也是早在明代之前优质青花瓷便已存世的铁证。

它们所传达的信息还不止于此。两只花瓶上的题字略有不同，左边一只上写的是：