Elephant-handled Famille-rose Vase with Revolving Interior and Chinese Characters for Recording Years and Days on a Yellow Ground

The vase has a reticulated exterior and an independently revolving interior. A small vase is set inside, the neck of which links with the exterior so it can rotate. The small vase has famille rose against white glaze.
The shoulder of the larger vase have twenty-four framed roundels containing names of Heavenly Stems (tian gan) and Earthly Branches (di zhi) in seal script (zhuan shu), as well as two words in regular script (kai shu) reading “jia zi” (the first year of the sixty-year cycle) and “ten thousand years” (wan nian). They are part of the sixty-year cycle calendar calculated in the traditional way. The belly is decorated with yellow glaze, flowers and interlocking branches. On it are four windows displaying each season opening to the interior vase which has paintings of children (see details). People could turn the interior vase and see many children at play in different seasons. On the bottom is the blue-and-white reign mark in archaic seal script (zhuan shu).
Since the three parts of the vase were fired separately, craftsmen had to seriously control temperatures to ensure these parts could be integrated. The vase with revolving interior was a new type of porcelain ornament innovated after the eighth year of the Qianlong reign (1743).