This blackware vase, fashioned in the style of the Southern Song Dynasty, was made by Edmund de Waal near the start of his career as a potter while living in Sheffield. After receiving an English degree from the University of Cambridge in 1986, de Waal immediately began a career as an independent potter. He settled first in Herefordshire, where he made stoneware in the manner of Bernard Leach, and then moved to Sheffield in 1988. He remained there until 1990, when he won a scholarship from the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, which led him to study in Japan. In The White Road: A Journey Into Obsession, published in 2015, de Waal gave this account of his time in Sheffield:

"In Page Hall, a hill of back-to-back terraced houses on the edges of Attercliffe where the last steelworks were being demolished, I found a house and workshop that had been used as a carpenter’s shop. 128 Robey Street was the end of the road. Beyond was Wincobank, a hill of scrub and burnt-out cars. […] It was skinny at the front with a door that no one used, but round the back was a yard with a two-storey outbuilding, a raddled floor and a cap-sized roof, but enough space to build a kiln and make pots. […] I knew no one. This was a place chosen because I knew no one. I got to work."

He was interested in Song Dynasty wares at the time. This blackware vase takes the form of a mallet jar, or ‘kinuta’, ‘a form made in the Sung Dynasty and then revived periodically. It is a beautiful shape based on a mallet that you might use to beat cloth, a flared rim from a long neck that emerges from a swelled body.’ Although de Waal attempted to make white porcelain at this time, he was seemingly unable to fire his kiln to an adequate temperature; the result was stoneware, which he coated in a glaze. In his brief memoir about Sheffield, published in The White Road, he recalled making kinuta in white but not black—a failure of memory or wishful thinking, partly occasioned by the overriding theme of whiteness that dominates the book.

This vase was made some time between 1988 and 1990 when de Waal lived and worked in Sheffield. Along with two other ceramics, it was given by de Waal as a gift to the previous owner who gave the following account of his brief acquaintance with the artist:

"In the nineteen-eighties, a friend took me to visit Edmund in his tiny terraced house in Sheffield. His house was sparsely but stylishly decorated and he had made by hand window blinds and a bed canopy out of bamboo canes. He had transformed a small outbuilding into a pottery studio with a kiln and wheel. All three of us were stoney broke, for different reasons, so I had taken some food to reheat for our Sunday lunch. After lunch by way of thanks, Edmund took me to his studio and told me to choose some pots […]."