Early China porcelain trade

By Ceramic Design

Wares from the 16th century include Kraak porcelain, Yixing stonewares, Blanc-de-Chine, Blue and white porcelain, Famille verte, noire, jaune and rose, Chinese Imari, Armorial wares and Canton porcelain. Chinese export porcelain is generally decorative, but without the symbolic significance of wares produced for the home market. With the exception of the rare Huashi soft paste wares, Chinese porcelain is hard paste made using china clay and Chinese porcelain stone, baidunzi. While rim chips and hairline cracks are common, pieces tend not to stain. Chinese wares are usually thinner than Japanese and do not have the Japanese stilt marks.

In the 16th century, Portuguese traders began importing late Ming dynasty Blue and white porcelain porcelains to Europe, resulting in the growth of the Kraak porcelain trade (named after the Portuguese ships called carracks in which it was transported). In 1602 and 1604, two Portuguese carracks, the San Yago and Santa Catarina, were captured by the Dutch and their cargos, which included thousands of items of porcelain, were auctioned, igniting a European mania for porcelain. Buyers included the Kings of England and France. Many European nations then established trading companies in the Far East, the most important being the Dutch East India Company or VOC. The trade continued until the mid-17th century when civil wars caused by the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 disrupted suppliers and the European traders turned to Japan.

As valuable and highly-prized possessions, pieces of Chinese export porcelain appeared in many seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. The illustration (right) shows a painting by Jan Treck that includes two Kraak-style bowls, probably late Ming, the one in the foreground being of a type called by the Dutch klapmuts. The blue pigment used by the artist has faded badly since the picture was painted.

Under the Kangxi reign (1662–1722) the Chinese porcelain industry at Jingdezhen was reorganised and the export trade was soon flourishing again. Chinese export porcelain from the late 17th century included Blue and white and Famille verte wares (and occasionally Famille noire and jaune). Wares included garnitures of vases, dishes, teawares, ewers, and other useful wares, figure models, animals and birds. Blanc-de-Chine porcelains and Yixing stonewares arrived in Europe giving inspiration to many of the European potters.

For the potters of Jingdezhen the manufacture of porcelain wares for the European export market presented new difficulties. Writing from the city in 1712 the French Jesuit missionary Père François Xavier d’Entrecolles records that “…the porcelain that is sent to Europe is made after new models that are often eccentric and difficult to reproduce; for the least defect they are refused by the merchants, and so they remain in the hands of the potters, who cannot sell them to the Chinese, for they do not like such pieces”.

Qingbai wares

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Qingbai wares (also called ‘yingqing’) were made at Jingdezhen and at many other southern kilns from the time of the Northern Song Dynasty until they were eclipsed in the 14th century by underglaze-decorated blue and white wares. Qingbai in Chinese literally means “clear blue-white“. The qingbai glaze is a porcelain glaze, so-called because it was made using pottery stone. The qingbai glaze is clear, but contains iron in small amounts. When applied over a white porcelain body the glaze produces a greenish-blue colour that gives the glaze its name. Some have incised or moulded decorations.

The Song dynasty qingbai bowl illustrated was likely made at the Jingdezhen village of Hutian, which was also the site of the Imperial kilns established in 1004. The bowl has incised decoration, possibly representing clouds or the reflection of clouds in the water. The body is white, translucent and has the texture of very-fine sugar, indicating that it was made using crushed and refined pottery stone instead of pottery stone and kaolin. The glaze and the body of the bowl would have been fired together, in a saggar, possibly in a large wood-burning dragon-kiln or climbing-kiln, typical of southern kilns in the period.

Though many Song and Yuan qingbai bowls were fired upside down in special segmented saggars, a technique first developed at the Ding kilns in Hebei province. The rims of such wares were left unglazed but were often bound with bands of silver, copper or lead.

One remarkable example of qingbai porcelain is the so-called Fonthill Vase, described in a guide for Fonthill Abbey published in 1823

“…an oriental china bottle, superbly mounted, said to be the earliest known specimen of porcelain introduced into Europe”

The vase was made at Jingdezhen, probably around 1300 and was sent as a present to Pope Benedict XII by one of the last Yuan emperors of China, in 1338. The mounts referred to in the 1823 description were of enamelled silver-gilt and were added to the vase in Europe in 1381. An 18th century water colour of the vase complete with its mounts exists, but the mounts themselves were removed and lost in the 19th century. The vase is now in the National Museum of Ireland. It is often held that qingbai wares were not subject to the higher standards and regulations of the other porcelain wares, since they were made for everyday use. They were mass-produced, and received little attention from scholars and antiquarians. The Fonthill Vase, given by a Chinese emperor to a pope, might appear to cast at least some doubt on this view.

Blue and white wares

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Following in the tradition of earlier qingbai porcelains, blue and white wares are glazed using a transparent porcelain glaze. The blue decoration is painted onto the body of the porcelain before glazing, using very finely ground cobalt oxide mixed with water. After the decoration has been applied the pieces are glazed and fired.

It is believed that underglaze blue and white porcelain was first made in the Tang Dynasty. Only three complete pieces of Tang blue and white porcelain are known to exist (in Singapore from Indonesian Belitung shipwreck ), but shards dating to the 8th or 9th century have been unearthed at Yangzhou in the Jiangsu province. It has been suggested that the shards originated from a kiln in the province of Henan. In 1957, excavations at the site of a pagoda in the province Zhejiang uncovered a Northern Song bowl decorated with underglaze blue and further fragments have since been discovered at the same site. In 1970, a small fragment of a blue and white bowl, again dated to the 11th century, was also excavated in the province of Zhejiang.

In 1975, shards decorated with underglaze blue were excavated at a kiln site in Jiangxi and, in the same year, an underglaze blue and white urn was excavated from a tomb dated to 1319, in the province of Jiangsu. It is of interest to note that a Yuan funerary urn decorated with underglaze blue and underglaze red and dated 1338 is still in the Chinese taste, even though by this time the large-scale production of blue and white porcelain in the Yuan, Mongol taste had started its influence at Jingdezhen.

Starting early in the 14th century, blue and white porcelain rapidly became the main product of Jingdezhen, reaching the height of its technical excellence during the later years of the reign of the Kangxi Emperor and continuing in present times to be an important product of the city.

The tea caddy illustrated shows many of the characteristics of blue and white porcelain produced during the Kangxi period. The translucent body showing through the clear glaze is of great whiteness and the cobalt decoration, applied in many layers, has a fine blue hue. The decoration, a sage in a landscape of lakes and mountains with blazed rocks is typical of the period. The piece would have been fired in a saggar (a lidded ceramic box intended to protect the piece from kiln debris, smoke and cinders during firing) in a reducing atmosphere in a wood-burning egg-shaped kiln, at a temperature approaching 1350 °C.

Distinctive blue-and-white porcelain was exported to Japan where it is known as Tenkei blue-and-white ware or ko sometsukei. This ware is thought to have been especially ordered by tea masters for Japanese ceremony.

Ru ware

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Like Ding ware, Ru (Wade-Giles: ju) was produced in North China for imperial use. The Ru kilns were near the Northern Song capital at Kaifeng. In similar fashion to Longquan celadons, Ru pieces have small amounts of iron in their glaze that oxidize and turn greenish when fired in a reducing atmosphere. Ru wares range in colour—from nearly white to a deep robin’s egg—and often are covered with reddish-brown crackles. The crackles, or “crazing,” are caused when the glaze cools and contracts faster than the body, thus having to stretch and ultimately to split, (as seen in the detail at right; see also ). The art historian James Watt comments that the Song dynasty was the first period that viewed crazing as a merit rather than a defect. Moreover, as time went on, the bodies got thinner and thinner, while glazes got thicker, until by the end of the Southern Song the ‘green-glaze’ was thicker than the body, making it extremely ‘fleshy’ rather than ‘bony,’ to use the traditional analogy (see section on Guan ware, below). Too, the glaze tends to drip and pool slightly, leaving it thinner at the top, where the clay peeps through.

As with Ding ware, the Song imperial court lost access to the Ru kilns after it fled Kaifeng when the Jin invaded, and settled at Lin’an in Hangzhou, towards the south. There the Emperor Gaozong founded the Guan yao (‘official kilns’) right outside the new capital in order to produce imitations of Ru ware. However, posterity has remembered Ru ware as something unmatched by later attempts; Master Gao says, “Compared with Guan yao, the above were of finer substance and more brilliant luster.”

Ding ware

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Ding (Wade-Giles: Ting) ware was produced in Ding Xian (modern Chu-yang), Hebei Province, slightly south-west of Beijing. Already in production when the Song emperors came to power in 940, Ding ware was the finest porcelain produced in northern China at the time, and was the first to enter the palace for official imperial use. Its paste is white, generally covered with an almost transparent glaze that dripped and collected in “tears,” (though some Ding ware was glazed a monochrome black or brown, white was the much more common type). Overall, the Ding aesthetic relied more on its elegant shape than ostentatious decoration; designs were understated, either incised or stamped into the clay prior to glazing. Due to the way the dishes were stacked in the kiln, the edged remained unglazed, and had to be rimmed in metal such as gold or silver when used as tableware. Some hundred years later, a Southern Song era writer commented that it was this defect that led to its demise as favoured imperial ware. Since the Song court lost access to these northern kilns when they fled south, it has been argued that Qingbai ware (see below) was viewed as a replacement for Ding.

Although not as highly ranked as Ru ware, the late Ming connoisseur Gao Lian awards Ding ware a brief mention in his volume Eight Discourses on the Art of Living. Classified under his sixth discourse, the section on “pure enjoyment of cultured idleness,” Master Gao says:
“The best sort has marks on it like tear-stains… Great skill and ingenuity is displayed in selecting the forms of the vessels…”

Jian tea wares

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Jian blackwares, mainly comprising tea wares, were made at kilns located in Jianyang of Fujian province. They reached the peak of their popularity during the Song dynasty. The wares were made using locally-won, iron-rich clays and fired in an oxidising atmosphere at temperatures in the region of 1300 °C. The glaze was made using clay similar to that used for forming the body, except fluxed with wood-ash. At high temperatures the molten glaze separate to produce a pattern called hare’s fur. When Jian wares were set tilted for firing, drips run down the side, creating evidence of liquid glaze pooling.

Jian tea bowlSong Dynasty, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The hare’s fur Jian tea bowl illustrated in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was made during the Song dynasty (960 to 1279 AD) and exhibits the typical pooling, or thickening, of the glaze near the bottom. The hare’s fur patterning in the glaze of this bowl resulted from the random effect of phase separation during early cooling in the kiln and is unique to this bowl. This phase separation in the iron-rich glazes of Chinese blackwares was also used to produce the well-known oil-spot, teadust and partridge-feather glaze effects. No two bowls have identical patterning. The bowl also has a dark brown iron-foot which is typical of this style. It would have been fired, probably with several thousand other pieces, each in its own stackable saggar, in a single-firing in a large dragon kiln. One such kiln, built on the side of a steep hill, was almost 150 metres in length, though most Jian dragon kilns were fewer than 100 metres in length.

An 11th century resident of Fujian wrote:

At the time, tea was prepared by whisking powdered leaves that had been pressed into dried cakes together with hot water, (somewhat akin to matcha in Japanese Tea Ceremony). The water added to this powder produced a white froth that would stand out better against a dark bowl. Tastes in preparation changed during the Ming dynasty; the Hongwu Emperor himself preferred leaves to powdered cakes, and would accept only leaf tea as tribute from tea-producing regions. Leaf tea, in contrast to powdered tea, was prepared by steeping whole leaves in boiling water – a process that led to the invention of the teapot and subsequent popularity of Yixing wares over the dark tea bowls.

Jian tea wares of the Song dynasty were also greatly appreciated and copied in Japan, where they were known as tenmoku wares.

Beautiful Ceramic Fair Cup

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Drinkware Type: Mugs Material: Ceramic Ceramic Type: Clay
Certification: CE / EU Feature: Eco-Friendly Place of Origin: Jiangxi China (Mainland)
Model Number: RYR108 COLOR: blue and white
Packaging & Delivery
Packaging Detail: 10pcs into a box or carton. It must be packed carefully
Delivery Detail: 15-45days

Specifications
Cup for drinking tea, milk, coffee
Good quality and cheap price
It is a eco-friendly product
We accept small order

Features:

Item No: RYR108

Material: fine ceramics

Size: 4.5 centimeters high, 10 centimeters diameter.

Place of origin: Jingdezhen China

Package: 10pcs into a box or carton. It must be packed carefully.

Description:

Ceramic Fair Cup, handmade by experienced artist.It has fine painter and best workmanship.

Use fair cup to drink tea is a joy, it can ensure the tea with same aroma,same color and same concentration.

Ancient ceramics in Palace Museum destroyed

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A piece of ancient Chinese ceramics in the Beijing Palace Museum, known as Ge Ware, has been destroyed due to improper handling. Academics were inspecting the pieces when the accident occurred. The Palace Museum’s inspection of the ancient ceramics has now been suspended.

Ge Ware originated in the Song Dynasty, about 800 years ago. Ge Ware represents one of the pinnacles of Chinese porcelain. Only a few hundred pieces remain, all of them priceless. Ge Ware is renowned for the high skill needed to create their distinctive crackling pattern.

Ge Ware destroyed due to improper handling.

2009 China Jingdezhen Int’l Ceramic Fair

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Photo taken on Oct. 18, 2009 shows a blue-and-white porcelain clock on shown at the exhibition hall of 2009 China Jingdezhen International Ceramic Fair in Jingdezhen, east China’s Jiangxi Province. The 2009 China Jingdezhen International Ceramic Fair kicked off here on Oct. 18.

Visitors tour the exhibition hall of 2009 China Jingdezhen International Ceramic Fair in Jingdezhen, east China’s Jiangxi Province, Oct. 18, 2009.

A visitor views exhibits at the exhibition hall of 2009 China Jingdezhen International Ceramic Fair in Jingdezhen, east China’s Jiangxi Province, Oct. 18, 2009.

A woman shows blue-and-white porcelain clocks at the exhibition hall of 2009 China Jingdezhen International Ceramic Fair in Jingdezhen

A woman shows a blue-and-white porcelain clock at the exhibition hall of 2009 China Jingdezhen International Ceramic Fair in Jingdezhen, east China’s Jiangxi Province, Oct. 18, 2009. The 2009 China Jingdezhen International Ceramic Fair kicked off here on Oct. 18.

Shanghai Ceramic Fair spread the “China Zhi-made”

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Following last year’s Shanghai International Ceramic Art Fair life after success, the second Taobo Hui will also be held on November 11 Mart opened in this year’s theme is “Chinese wisdom made.”

Participate in this year’s addition Tao Bohui exhibitors last year, there are Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Korea, Japan, agencies are encouraged to register. Organizing Committee, said China is rising, with the quintessence of ceramic building international ceramic cultural exchange platform for the times after the Expo, innovation and creativity will be interpreted as a conscious mission of the city. International perspective, China Zhi-made, lead the fashion will greatly enhance the value of Shanghai Tao Bohui, it is the annual conference of aesthetics of urban life, Expo will be cross-linked life and art of gesture. This Taobo Hui will be set up a museum, and the International Pavilion, living museum, the Museum of Art, cutting-edge museum, museum and activities will also set up a publishing area, and grouped the six external development interact. Has launched the “2010 tea said,” – Gaochun ceramic Weitepeini Cup International Design Competition will be grouped Jury Award and Media Award, this is the first time in China’s ceramic industry separate media award. And professional accreditation of its taste, cultural differences, will be a means on the current Taobo Hui topic.

This competition was officially launched this month, in November announced the results and awards presentation, contest aimed at mining, ceramic design and creative support personnel, the revitalization of China’s ceramic culture. Competition to attract Italy, Finland, the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Switzerland, designers, art organizations and institutions and domestic active designers, studios and institutions involved. Competition will eventually selected the most creative level, the most development potential, the most accepted and recognized by the market designer works, and give rewards and extensive promotion, the full dissemination of contemporary Chinese ceramics and Chinese intellectual-made charm.