Porcelain on the Silk Road — The Silk Road Atlas

Chinese porcelain is the most important ceramic export in the history of the world. From the Tang dynasty onward, the fine white wares of the southern Chinese kilns, and later the blue-and-white porcelain of the Yuan and Ming, were shipped in their millions to the markets of the Islamic world, the Indian Ocean, and, eventually, Europe. The porcelain trade was, in the later centuries of the Silk Road, the largest single component of the Chinese export economy, and the taste for porcelain in distant markets shaped the production centres, the trade routes, and even the development of European ceramics.

Porcelain, stoneware, and the Chinese tradition

Porcelain is distinguished from other ceramics by two technical features: it is made from a fine white clay, kaolin, mixed with a feldspathic rock called petuntse, and it is fired at temperatures above 1,300 °C, hot enough to vitrify the body of the vessel into a hard, translucent, ringing material. Chinese potters had developed the technique by the Han dynasty, and the first true porcelains appear in the archaeological record of the first and second centuries CE. The earliest wares were modest: small jars, ewers, and figurines in a pale greenish or buff colour, fired in the southern kilns of what is now Zhejiang province. I have handled a few of the Han pieces in the Shanghai Museum, and “modest” is the right word — they are technically remarkable, but they are not the gleaming white wares the word “porcelain” brings to mind.

Porcelain is, in many ways, the most legible of Silk Road commodities.

The technical and aesthetic breakthrough came with the Tang dynasty (618–907). The Tang kilns produced the first porcelains of real international reputation: thin-walled white wares exported across Central Asia and the maritime routes. The surviving Tang porcelain is found in archaeological sites from Fustat (old Cairo) to Samarkand, from Japan to East Africa. The most famous single Tang shipwreck for porcelain is the one found off the coast of Indonesia at the site of the old Srivijayan port, which is now in the care of the Indonesian National Archaeological Research Centre. A point that is often missed: most of the “Tang porcelain” sold in the antique market is, in fact, nineteenth-century imitation; the genuine pieces are rare and almost all in museum collections.

Jingdezhen and the imperial factories

The single most important site in the history of Chinese porcelain is Jingdezhen, in Jiangxi province (the small city is in the northeast of the province, in the Changjiang drainage), which became the principal imperial production centre under the Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century and remained so into the twentieth. The Jingdezhen kilns combined the local kaolin and petuntse with an exceptionally fine technical tradition, producing a range of wares — celadons, blue-and-white, and the imperial yellow, peach-bloom, and oxblood glazes — that have never been surpassed. The Jingdezhen site is, in my view, the most important industrial archaeological site in East Asia, and the on-site museum (Jingdezhen Ceramics Museum, on the western side of the city) is worth a day even for a non-specialist.

The economic and political weight of the porcelain trade was enormous. By the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, porcelain was the most valuable Chinese export by weight, and the imperial court regulated the production of the finest wares through a system of commissions and prohibitions. The surviving imperial wares of the Yongle (1403–1424) and Xuande (1426–1435) reigns represent the technical and artistic peak of the tradition. So central did porcelain become to the Chinese economy that, alongside silk and tea, it formed one of the three pillars of late imperial export, and the technologies of porcelain-making — like those of sericulture — were guarded with imperial secrecy for as long as possible. Popular accounts tend to oversell the secrecy; the techniques of porcelain-making were understood in the Islamic world from at least the twelfth century, and what was being protected was the quality, not the existence, of the Chinese product.

A personal note

“Porcelain” in English covers a wide range of high-fired white ceramics, from the dense, white-bodied Jingdezhen wares to the more porous Islamic imitations. The Chinese distinguished between many grades. The reader looking for a single, well-defined commodity will be frustrated; the category is partly a Western one imposed on a more diverse Asian production.

Porcelain, stoneware, and the Chinese tradition

Jingdezhen and the imperial factories

A personal note

Further reading

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