This bowl recently came out of the estate of the late Honorable Ambassador Philip Habib. (Please see his biography below).

The bowl is from the 12th or 13th century, during the Goryeo Dynasty of Korea. It was presented to Ambassador and Mrs. Philip Habib during the period when Mr. Habib was the US Ambassador to South Korea, during the early 1970s. It measures 6-3/8” across and about 1-3/4" tall. The bowl has everted walls, molded along the interior walls with raised plant sprigs visible beneath a heavily crazed dark grey-green glaze. The condition is fair, considering it’s at least 800 years old! The dark mark on the lip is a "kiln-kiss", where the bowl was touching either the wall of the kiln or another piece being fired, and isn't damage, per se. I've tried to photograph the bowl to show its defects as clearly as possible. There are two old repairs to the rim, with 3 pieces that had to be put back into place. The glue is definitely water-based, so the repairs could be easily redone, if so desired. There are also two small built-up areas to losses in the lip; the larger one is the size of about 2 grains of rice; the smaller in-fill is pencil-point size. There are also a few tight hairlines, visible under close inspection. Otherwise it’s in very presentable shape. It comes in an old cedar (or perhaps paulownia-wood) box.

This is a lovely antiquity from a great estate. We guarantee it 100% to be as described.

Philip Habib (1920-1992) was a career diplomat, whose accomplishments spanned 40 years, after serving in World War Two. He was the US Ambassador to South Korea, Assistant Secretary of State, Under-Secretary of State, the US Special Envoy to the Paris Peace Talks and to the Camp David Peace Accords and many other diplomatic missions. He single-handedly brokered the peace between Israel and Lebanon during their 1982 conflict, for which President Reagan awarded Habib the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- the highest civilian honor that can be given to a US citizen. He was also given the Legion d’Honneur by France and a host of other honoraria from all over the world. After retiring from the State Department, he taught at Stanford University. A biography was published about Ambassador Habib in 2000, and in 2006, the US Post Office issued a stamp in his honor. Warren Zevon wrote a song about him called “The Envoy”, from his album of the same name. The US State Department has a room named after him, the Korean Ambassador’s resident is “Habib House”, and the New York Times, in their obituary of Habib, called him “the outstanding professional diplomat of his generation”.

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