Porcelain

Porcelains (and ceramics generally) offer an opportunity matched only by textiles to study changing conceptions of consumption over long periods at the level of global exchange. The word porcelain derives from a term for cowrie shells in various medieval European Romance languages, suggesting early associations with both a material surface and an exchange medium. Today, it is generally understood as a high-fired (usually above 1200°C), vitrified, and translucent white earthenware made with kaolin (gaolingtu, ideal: Al2Si2O5[OH)4]) and petuntse, or pottery stone (cishi, a pegmatite composed of feldspar [Al2O32SiO2K2O], and quartz [SiO2]), but this varies according to time and place in relation to exchange, imitative, and consumption practices. Desirable qualities include plasticity of form before firing, resulting in remarkable hardness and durability, while high-temperature glazes allow for surfaces of detailed texture, painting, and writing. Often, porcelain serves both as a consumer object and as a medium of consumption—for drugs and spices, for heated drinks (notably coffee and tea), inks and cosmetics, and meals. Imported porcelains interact with more widespread but harder to exchange folk- and proto-industrial ceramic traditions, pulling regional consumers into broader fashion systems and international styles while localizing such fashion systems within regional designs.

After a period of development from Shang dynasty high-fired stoneware (ca. 1400 BCE) to pre-Tang dynasty white wares (ca. 600 CE) with relatively modest production levels, porcelains became an important medium and played a significant role in consumption practices (defined broadly) among the elite in East Asia from the Five Dynasties (907–960) period. By the ninth century, Arabic and Persian writers in the Persian Gulf region called high-fired earthenware chini-ye faghfuri (from Middle Persian bagpur, “son of god”), suggesting tributary gift exchange with the Tang imperial court (618–907) and consumption practices at Tang Chang'an. Imitations in tin-glazed earthenware from Persia to the Levant became available for broader consumption, ultimately impacting the development of European majolica. During the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), more prosaic export wares and the possibility of special orders like Persian script on drug jars (albarellos) emerged. More generally, archeological finds suggest widespread use of many kinds of porcelains from the Yuan and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties in the Indian Ocean basin, from Java to Kenya, with significant surviving collections at the Ardebil Shrine in Iran (now in Tehran) and at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. The Jianwen emperor (1399–1402) established an imperial porcelain factory at Jingdezhen, a gesture repeated in Korea at Punwan in the 1460s. The blue-and-white motif on many Ming porcelains, reminiscent of Yuan Dynasty links to the trade in Persian cobalt, became a staple of imperial and elite households in the fifteenth century [Page 1112]as well as southern Chinese exports and encouraged the growth of private and regional kiln complexes, including several in Vietnam. The Ming saw a sharp increase in forgeries (notably using old reign marks) aimed at wealthy merchant and gentry collectors and a developing language of connoisseurship among the elite to define authenticity and antiques.

From the seventeenth century, and because of their role as a medium for the spread of coffee, tea, chocolate, and sugar, porcelains begin to appear in the urban societies of Europe and Japan in literature and plays (Shakespeare), domestic inventories, paintings (Dutch still life and Japanese albums), retail infrastructures (china shops, teahouses, coffeehouses), and a wide variety of other contexts. Usage of woodblock illustrations from Chinese encyclopedias and novels for designs tied porcelains into other consumer goods such as books and printed fabrics. New Japanese porcelains produced after 1616 at Arita encouraged further copying in both Europe and China, an important stimulus for the hybridized styles of chinoiserie. Among Jesuits, attempts were made to define porcelain universally in terms of a manufacturing process and in terms of desired qualities. Louis Le Comte (Nouveaux memoires, 1696) made the most influential list of the latter, arguing that porcelain should be judged in terms of transparency (or thickness), hardness, whiteness, smoothness, politeness (brightness), painting, and color. This language encouraged experimentation to achieve particular effects desired by consumers, paradoxically making the variety of aesthetic modes of consuming porcelain simultaneously more uniformly internationalized and more localized.

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