Small celadon incense burner

This is a small celadon incense burner with a bowl-shaped body and three monster head-shaped feet. Its exterior and interior are finely glazed and crackled except that the outside and inside base are unglazed, exposing the buff body. On top of the exterior there are four groups of incised leaf-like designs framed by two relief bowstring patterns. Below them are ba gua wen (the Eight Trigrams) in relief. A deeply carved ren character (human) is represented inside the unglazed base. Ba gua wen are the eight basic combinations of strokes in Zhou Yi (The Classic of Change), which were used as decorative elements on Chinese ceramics as early as the Yuan dynasty (though some scholars prefer the Song). A continuous straight line '-' represents yang, the male principle, and a broken line '- -' symbolizes yin, the female principle. The two signs are combined to form the eight trigrams to be the symbols of the eight natural phenomena such as qian (heaven), kun (earth), zhen (thunder), xun (wind), kan (water), li (fire), gen (mountain) and dui (lake). Among them, the qian and kun are considered to be the source of everything in the natural world and human society. It is said that Fuxi invented the system and later, the Daoists adopted and developed the idea in their classics. When Daoism was most in favor during the Jiajing reign of the Ming dynasty (1522-1566), the eight-trigram design became popular on artifacts. This piece bears much resemblance to a Yuan celadon incense burner, illustrated in page 125 from Mr. and Mrs. Mascarelli's book titled The Ceramics of China: 500 BC to 1912 AD (Atglen, PA.: Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 2003), which exhibits a similar shape and decorative style. Accordingly, it is attributed to the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368)