This porcelain teapot in the shape of a peach is decorated with slight relief and coloured glazes — light green, red and blue. This type of teapot, with an opening in the bottom into which the water was poured, was common in China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The special funnel-like internal shape of the vessel meant that the water stayed inside and could be poured out through the spout. The Hermitage teapot is one of the articles of a high artistic and technical standard produced in the workshops of Jingdezhen in the first decades of the eighteenth century.