One of the studio’s grandest early designs, this large plate measures more than 37 centimetres across. It is dominated by an enormous white elephant, richly caparisoned and carrying a howdah. The elephant is overrun by karako, the plump Chinese boys of East Asian auspicious imagery. Some are crowded into the howdah and others ride on the animal’s back or balance on its tusks, while more play around its feet. The rim is bordered with millefleurs within a key-fret edge.
The Khalili Collection dates the plate to about 1890, which places it in the first decade of Meizan’s Osaka studio. The design was evidently a success. Bonhams sold a closely comparable charger in New York in 2022, catalogued as nearly identical to this one, and the Osaka Museum of History holds a plate on the same theme of a white elephant with children, marked ‘Meizan sei’. The plate is published in Impey and Fairley (1995), cat. 4, and in Earle’s Splendors of Imperial Japan (2002), cat. 165.