"But when I come to compare the miserable people of these countries with ours, their fabricks, their manner of living, their government, their religion, their wealth and their glory (as some call it), I must confess I do not so much think it is worth naming, or worth my while to write of, or any that shall come after me to read." In the early 18th century, the English author Daniel Defoe put this diatribe against the Chinese into the mouth of the hero of his best-selling novel Robinson Crusoe.

After making its way across the broad oceans, Oriental porcelain became a symbol of power and wealth in European royal palaces. Pictured at left is a gallery in the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich, Germany.

Know your shame and work to improve?

When the late-Qing-dynasty scholar Lin Qinnan was translating this book into Chinese, he was so mortified by this passage that he wanted to "rip this book to shreds and throw away [his] inkstone and writing-brush." But his co-translator admonished him: "Don't be angry, sir! Better rather to translate every line, to let our compatriots know their shame and work hard to strengthen themselves, in order to wipe away this insult." Only then did Mr. Lin "calm his anger and go on to complete the book."

If Lin Qinnan had seen how the fourth edition of Defoe's later work Tour of Great Britain found a great source of "national pride" in an English-made cup which was "little inferior to those from China," would he have felt any better?

And what was so marvelous about that English ware, that it could arouse national pride in Englishmen of such exacting standards? Perhaps a slightly later newspaper advertisement can give us a few clues.

The advertisement, which appeared in an English newspaper in 1760, announces the supply by a local firm of "a good assortment of Foreign China and a great variety of useful English China of the newest improvement, which they engage will wear as well as foreign, and will change gratis if broke with hot water."

The National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam was formerly the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company, which once dominated the sea trade with the Orient.

Nothing to get steamed up about

In fact, the English did not "discover" the secret of making hard-paste porcelain until the mid-18th century, and even at the end of that century their ware could still not pass the boiling water test. On this scale of a country's level of development, England was half a century behind Germany, the first European country to produce genuine porcelain, and a full thousand years behind the China which Defoe so disparaged. In other words, the English staked their "national pride" on nothing more than fragile "soft-paste porcelain," halfway between earthenware and real porcelain.

So really there was nothing for Lin Qinnan to get stamed up about. Defoe was just a garrulous journalist, and had never been to China; at most he was an inventive best-seller writer. His Robinson Crusoe was completed in 1719, when China, under the Qing emperor Kangxi, enjoyed prosperity and abundance, and its international trade reached to the four corners of the Earth. In Europe, the craze for China's philosophy, agricultural economy and decorative arts was still in full swing. Lin had no reason for shame.

The problem was that the humiliations and disasters which plagued China from the 19th century on were enough to confuse even someone as knowledgeable as Lin Qinnan. For the past century and more, the militaristic national pride of the rich Western states has been sufficient to make even the best informed people unconsciously look through Eurocentric spectacles when looking back across this stretch of the history of East-West exchange.

Blue-and-white porcelain plates decorated with flower motifs in panels are typical examples of carrack ware. The letters VOC form the insignia of the Dutch East India Company.

Distance no object

"This is Chinese Ming dynasty blue-and-white ware," a British Museum researcher explains to a crowd of visitors she is leading on a guided tour. "For us, it is almost the earliest porcelain the English knew, but for people from Taiwan, Japan or mainland China these are very late pieces."

After being displayed at the National Museum of History in Taipei, in the spring of this year the British Museum's exhibition "Ancient Chinese Trade Export Porcelain" returned to London to be shown in the Museum itself. As usual, the exhibition was accompanied by guided tours and other activities. The researcher phrased her opening remarks in this way to try to illuminate the background to the oriental trade of several hundred years ago, and to explain why the Europeans of that era were prepared to sail half way round the world to buy vast quantities of porcelain from far-off China.

In the true spirit of descendants of the sea power of those days, the question which most interests local visitors is: "So what did we sell them?" The guide, who had not initially planned to go into the question of the imbalance of trade, hesitates for a moment, then replies: "In fact in those days the Middle Kingdom wasn't all that interested in our products."

A model of a 17th-century Dutch East India Company merchantman.

Forced to act

"Most people don't really understand that before the 18th century, Europeans didn't know how to make porcelain," says Dr. C.J.A. Jorg, Head of Collections at the Groningen Museum in Holland, stressing that this is why in the 17th century such large quantities of Chinese porcelain could be successfully imported into Europe and easily compete with the cheap earthenware on the local market.

Groningen Museum has a rich collection of Chinese export porcelain--including porcelain recovered from wrecked ships--and all kinds of European ceramics. Dr. Jorg once spent more than five years of hard work combing through all the 18th century files and correspondence of the Dutch East India Company--he was the first person to do so-- while at the same studying both economic history and art history. He emerged as a leading European authority on export porcelain.

Dr. Jorg has experimented with all kinds of ways of exhibiting the porcelain, including chronological order, arrangement by type, and comparison of Eastern and Western pieces, in the hope that visitors can grasp the flow of knowledge between China and the West in the field of ceramics, and the extraordinary history of the sea trade of those days. But he says that to get most ordinary people interested in that aspect of China is still "very difficult."

Rare and beautiful Oriental porcelain has long been a favorite decoration in European drawing rooms.

Do you have china in China too?

So just what view do "ordinary people" have of the 17th and 18th century trade in porcelain?

"East and West each had their strengths," says one management consultant from Paris. "Since the Chinese artisans of the time made things so well and so cheaply, why should we in the West have gone to all the trouble of producing them? That's the direction the whole global market is going today too." This is a typical attitude, taking it for granted that Europe was using the cheap labor of a developing country.

On the other hand, people with some understanding of ceramics--and even some early art historians--subscribe to the theory that "you can't make bricks without straw": that in those days in Europe no-one had found the china clay from which to fire porcelain.

But the reaction that takes the cake is: an old English lady during refined afternoon tea, asked her Chinese visitor in an infinitely friendly tone: "We call china 'china'; so in China you must have china as well?" The old lady's sincerity left one at a loss for words.

From the drawing room to the dining table, from condiment dishes to fork handles, blue-and-white porcelain is everywhere. The picture at left shows a reconstructed 18th-century interior in the Princesshof in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands.

That gleaming little shell

The common name of "china" for porcelain was a 17th-century English inspiration. But the origin of the word porcelain goes back to the Italian word porcella, which meant a kind of gleaming white cowrie shell. The first written reference to the manufacture of porcelain appears in the 13th-century venetian Marco Polo's great account of his voyages to the Orient. In Tartar-ruled Yuan-dynasty China, Mr. Polo saw beautifully glistening and translucent porcelain.

In his popular travelogue, Marco Polo recounts all kinds of strange tales of the East, and describes the prosperity and abundance of the happy land of China. Medieval Venice was the most highly developed of all Europe's commercial cities--how could there be anywhere else in the world more perfect? Furthermore the Europeans had suffered much at the hands of the ferocious Tartar horsemen--how could they come from an Eastern paradise? Was Marco Polo a great traveller, or a "great travel liar"? It seems all his European readers took his words with a large pinch of salt.

Dr. C.J.A. Jorg, Head of Collections at the Groningen Museum in the Netherlands, with some of the "hidden beauties" of the museum's holdings.

Blue and white sacral ware

Be that as it may, as far back as the 15th century Venetian alchemists are said to have learned from the Arabs how to make soft-paste porcelain, but it was weak and fragile and not a success. But it was around this time that the hard, tough, thin-bodied Chinese porcelain, which glistened white like a cowrie shell, began to appear in Europe. In 1442, Chinese porcelain was included among gifts which the Sultan of Egypt presented to the Doge of Venice.

What did the people of the time think of these treasures of distant lands? "The pieces were usually so dressed up with gold and silver by their owners that one could hardly recognize them," says Craig Clunas, former deputy curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum's Oriental Department, and a professor of art at the University of Sussex.

The exalted status of these early pieces is underscored by their appearance in works of art. In one early European religious painting, the artist places a blue-and-white porcelain bottle in the hands of one of the levantine kings in the biblical story of the Adoration of the Magi, and in the slightly later The Feast of the Gods by the Venetian Renaissance painters Bellini and Titian, one can also find pieces of Ming-dynasty blue-and-white ware. As for where the porcelain in these early paintings came from, most scholars infer that the pieces were probably rare gifts which had been exported overland from China to the Near East.

Chinese porcelain from the wreck of the Geldermalsen. After two centuries at the bottom of the sea, it finally arrived in Holland as ordered.

A symbol of maritime power

In 1428, a Portuguese obtained a manuscript copy of Marco Polo's travelogue in Venice and took it back to Portugal as a gift to his younger brother. His brother then sent ships out into the Atlantic to find new sea routes to the Eastern paradise.

In 1498, the Portuguese Vasco da Gama finally rounded the Cape of Good Hope and opened up a sea route between East and West. It was only after this that Chinese porcelain began to enter Europe as an article of trade.

In the 16th century, Portuguese ships held mastery of the seas. In 1514 they began to carry back Ming blue-and-white porcelain, which was received with surprise and delight by European kings and nobles, who thought they had been brought "The products of a heavenly host/ Indeed the fruits of a paradise sublime." At that time "all but the poorest monarchs could boast a few choice specimens in their treasuries," writes art historian Hugh Honour.

In this maritime century, possessing rare and valuable Chinese porcelain also symbolized sea power and a replete national treasury. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who controlled both the Habsburg dominions and the sea power of Spain, not only possessed large quantities of Chinese porcelain, but even had dishes made with his own family coat of arms; the collection of his son, King Philip II of Spain, comprised at least 3000 pieces. "Even Henry VIII in remote, uncultivated England, owned one piece," quips Hugh Honour.

Lotus shapes and panel decorations are typical of Chinese export porcelain from the Wanli reign.

From the curio cabinet to the dinner table

But times change. The fortunes of the sea are varied and unpredictable, and although the Spaniards and the Portuguese each had their day, the wind finally began to blow against them, and they fell from dominance. In the 17th century the masters of the seas came from the small and densely populated country of the Netherlands; and it was the Dutch too who brought porcelain out of the curio cabinets of princes, dukes and nobles, and onto the dining tables of rich merchants and even the middle classes. But in the 18th century the formerly "remote and uncultivated" Britain gained the upper hand, and ousted the Dutch from European markets in the Oriental trades.

The event which set the ball rolling for the Dutch in the porcelain trade was actually an act of piracy on the high seas.

In the late 16th century, Holland's sea power began to grow, and so Spain and Portugal, which had monopolized the China trades thus far, banned Dutch ships from docking and trading in Lisbon.

But the new stars of the sea did not take such treatment lying down, and soon put their feared cannons to good use. In 1604 the Portuguese merchant man Santa Catharina, fully loaded with Eastern goods including at least 100,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain, was captured in Asian waters by a Dutch ship and brought back to Holland, where the cargo was publicly auctioned in Amsterdam, creating quite a stir.

Because of the enormous quantities involved, and since the goods had been obtained without payment, prices came down, and not only the royal houses of England, France and other countries, but even many rich burghers and merchants could buy a few pieces of Chinese porcelain to give themselves a taste of aristocratic luxury.

Just to remind you what genuine, original Chinese porcelain looks like: a 12thcentury oval narcissus dish from the Ru imperial kiln of the Northern So ng dynasty, regarded as the creme de la creme of porcelain.

Buy all you can!

Having tested the market in this way, the directors of the Dutch East India Company confidently told the masters of their ships: "Buy all the Chinese porcelain you can." Of course, they did say "buy" and not "steal." But according to research by mainland Chinese scholar Shen Fuwei, after 1607 the Dutch continued to frequently attack Chinese sailing ships and seize their cargoes. Much Chinese porcelain was obtained "free of charge" in this way.

The Dutch innocently called the blue-and-white porcelain which was imported in large quantities from that time on, kraakporselein or "carrack ware." A carrack was a merchant vessel of the type of the captured Portuguese ship. Dr. Jorg says that the name kraakporselein was applied to mold-made porcelain produced especially for export at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province during the Ming dynasty. The ware had a very thin body and was mostly blue-and-white, and much of it was decorated around the edges with panels depicting Buddhist and Taoist symbols, and in the center with landscape scenes or animals. This blue-and-white export porcelain of the Wanli reign (1573-1619) thus became the archetype of Chinese porcelain in the eyes of Europeans.

A Chinese Yixing teapot? No, this is a red stoneware pot from Delft. （courtesy of Groningen Museum）

Taiwan becomes an entrepot

Taiwan, called "Ilha Formosa" or "beautiful island" by the Portuguese, played a crucial role in Holland's porcelain trade. Dr. Jorg points out that in the early 17th century the Dutch did not have access to any Chinese trading ports, and had to rely on buying porcelain from Chinese ships sailing to Malacca. It was only in 1625 when the Dutch occupied Taiwan as an Eastern trading base that the Dutch East India Company was able to order ware directly from Jingdezhen. The porcelain they bought was of better quality than they had previously been able to obtain, and they began to order it in the shapes of the tableware, drinking vessels and other utensils of earthenware, stoneware, wood, glass, pewter and silver which Europeans had been used to using, such as beer mugs, mustard pots, salt cellars, shaving basins, chamber pots and so on.

Such porcelain made to order was mostly produced during the Tianqi and Chongzhen reigns (1621-1644) at the close of the Ming dynasty, and so is known in the West as Ming-Qing transitional ware. This ware, designed specially for Europeans, was not only special in form, but also different in decoration. The decoration was no longer set off in panels, but composed in continuous scenes on the body of the pieces, and included landscapes with buildings and human characters, and narrative scenes from novels and plays. The designs stressed their Chineseness, and were tailored to the tastes of European consumers.

A scene from mythology--or an excuse for pornography?

The tea craze boosts the porcelain trade

"From the market economy point of view the introduction of porcelain as a new commodity came at a good moment," says Dr. Jorg. At the beginning of the 17th century Europe's economy was developing rapidly, and rich merchants had just begun to have the means to enjoy luxury products. Previously, when the Portuguese began bringing back porcelain in the 16th century, it had been beyond the means of anyone but royalty and nobles.

This was an age when everything was novel. As the sea routes between East and West were thrown open, ship after ship sailed back from the mysterious Orient carrying all kinds of things never seen before, such as spices, silks, porcelain and tea.

It was the fashion for tea drinking especially which greatly boosted the demand for porcelain from the second half of the 17th century and into the 18th century. The British and French merchant ships which crowded into Guangzhou to buy tea and porcelain to sell in Europe almost squeezed the Dutch out of the European market. By that time porcelain had gone from being a plaything of the rich to being an item of general daily use for which demand far outstripped supply.

According to figures compiled by Dr. Jorg, in the five years from 1729 to 1734 the Netherlands imported 4.5 million pieces of porcelain from China, 1.3 million more than in the whole of the 17th century. This shows how rapidly the porcelain trade grew and spread in the 18th century. He says that each year three to six ships of the Dutch East India Company would run out with the monsoon and arrive in Guangzhou around August. There they would first load porcelain as ballast. A layer of 200 wooden cases in the bottom of the hold would contain 200,000 to 250,000 pieces of porcelain, above which tea, silk and other cargo would be stowed. The boats would set out on their return voyage in December.

Erotic tableware. （courtesy of the National Museum of History）

Taking delivery--200 years late

Sifting through all the files, accounts and correspondence of the Dutch East India Company, it was as if Dr. Jorg had gone back in time to become the company's governor, busily directing its international trade. In recent years one sunken wreck after another has been discovered, and Dr. Jorg has actually had the opportunity to "take delivery" of the goods in them, checking them off piece by piece against the bills of lading. He has collaborated with auctioneers Christie's to inventory a full cargo of porcelain from an 18th-century East India Company merchantman. It was "an incredible experience." When Christie's phoned him and described the cargo, he was almost immediately certain that this was the Geldermalsen, which foundered in 1752.

Before this Dr. Jorg had been very curious about the "milk bowls" mentioned in cargo lists, for no one knew exactly what they were. But he now was not only able to find out what one really looked like --a full 479 of the 548 milk bowls listed on the despatch note were recovered! In addition there were very rarely seen porcelain "vomit pots," which were originally used by old gluttons whose eyes were bigger than their stomachs,to throw up into after a rich banquet. These pots were very fashionable around 1745, but soon fell from favor. The company gave explicit instructions that no more should be bought, but somehow they were still loaded. The vomit pots had previously been very rare items, but now the cargo yielded 495!

Armorial porcelain bearing the crest of the City of Groningen.

Just cheap labor?

What the Geldermalsen set before the world's eyes was a shipment of very typical export porcelain from the Qianlong reign (1736-1795) of the Qing dynasty. It mostly comprised European-style tableware, along with a small number of statuettes. The ware's decoration falls into three groups: blue-and-white, which was the most common and the cheapest at the time; imitations of blue, red and gold Japanese Imari ware, which were slightly more expensive; and polychrome enamel ware, which the Chinese had learned to make during the Kangxi reign (1662-1722), and which was twice as expensive as blue-and-white. There were detailed purchase lists for all these pieces, which clearly indicated quantity, price, type, decoration and shape, and in some cases samples were even attached.

Some Western art historians interpret the way Europeans ordered porcelain according to their own design as evidence that although Europeans didn't mind buying their porcelain from far-off China, "the style was not left up to them," again revealing a "cheap labor" mentality.

But in fact, "the Chinese were the most skilled trading nation." Dr. Jorg observes that from the correspondence of the East India Company, we can see that the Dutch believed the Chinese to be the most reliable of business people. And the Chinese already had over 1000 years of experience in exporting porcelain; Europe was just one part of this trade. He stresses: "Chinese potters were no strangers at all to working from samples provided by foreign customers, and in fact they were amazingly skilled in this."

And what did the Chinese say? The History of the Ming records: "[The red-haired barbarians'] lands have grown rich. When they see Chinese goods which please them, they are willing to spend lavishly, so the Chinese are pleased to trade with them." Thus it seems that both sides were happy!

Apart from cargoes of everyday utensils for ordinary Europeans, the Chinese porcelain merchants also supplied a more costly product which the Dutch East India Company was not very interested in, but which is quite fascinating: ware custom-made to special order, known as chine de commande.

The Crucifixion, Chinese style.

A Chinese song to a Western tune

In the 1730s the Dutch East India Company engaged an artist specially to design custom Chinoiserie porcelain. This painter, by the name of Cornelis Pronk, altogether composed four "Chinese style" designs: the commonly seen: "Parasol Lady," "Four Doctors" and "The Arbor," and also "Handwashing." The figures in them are a mish-mash of Chinese and Western elements, and the Four Doctors-- four scholars sitting in debate under a flowering plum tree--are believed by Dr. Klaas Ruitenbeek, curator of the oriental section of the Rijksmuseum (the Netherlands' national museum), to be transmogrifications of the four Chinese spirits of prosperity, honor, longevity and happiness.

Because of the high prices charged by the Chinese and insufficient profits, the Dutch East India Company only continued for a few years with this special-order ware with a commissioned designer. Thus most chine de commande was imported by other entrepreneurs and consists of individually ordered gifts, souvenirs and occasional curios.

Apart from some so-called "armorial porcelain" especially decorated with family crests, what is most interesting is the various kinds of European themes used: for instance, plates bearing humorous pictures to do with current events, like the Rotterdam riot, British elections, and the collapse of the Amsterdam stock market; there were also biblical and mythological scenes. Of course, Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem as printed by a Chinese potter looks to Chinese eyes for all the world like a Westernized version of "Laozi riding a buffalo." Dr. Jorg doubts very much whether Europeans would actually have eaten off or drunk out of platters or cups painted with the Crucifixion, and of the Greek and Roman mythological motifs, he says: "I'm afraid they were just an excuse to paint a half-naked pretty woman!"

The plate reads: "By God! My shares are all worthless!".

X-rated exports

But in fact venery needs no excuses. Among the custom ware there was no lack of out-and-out eroticism. It included X-rated pictures such as enticingly curvaceous Western ladies lounging on divans, halfnaked missionaries in hot pursuit of naked girls, and a Dutch village girl on a saucer which if turned over revealed the girl with her back turned and her skirts lifted.

European museums have a great deal of chine de commande, but the visitors who brush past it usually find it very hard to imagine that it was actually made by Chinese craftsmen. Klaas Ruitenbeek of the Rijksmuseum has experienced this attitude. On one occasion he took a visiting porcelain expert from mainland China to look at these pieces, but try as he might, he could not get the other man to believe that they came from "prim" China.

"Give me a time machine, and I'd ask the Chinese potters who made and painted this export ware what they thought of it." Dr. Jorg's curiosity is evidently shared by visitors who emerge grinning from looking at the custom ware. Jingdezhen Ceramic Annals from the late Qing dynasty goes some way to answering the question. It says this about export porcelain: "'Foreign ware' is all sold overseas. The merchants are mainly Cantonese; they sell it to the foreign devils. The ware comes in many curious patterns, which change from year to year." And in another passage, "[Ware made to foreign patterns] ...is brightly colored but crude and less elegant than our porcelain. Its style is despicable." And as to what image of the West the old craftsmen gained from chine de commande, we can only leave to your imagination.

The Rotterdam riot. Citizens are demolishing the house of the chief of police.

A new seaborne celebrity: tea

From the astonishing beauty of 16th-century blue-and-white ware to the strange and gaudy ware of the 18th century; from the curio cabinets of kings and nobles to the luxury dinner services of the middle classes, Chinese export porcelain captivated Europe for several centuries. Did the Europeans really never think about "technology transfer," instead sticking respectfully to the ideal of a global village with a "global division of labor"?

Of course they thought about it. In 16th and 17th century Europe, the quest to discover the "secret" of porcelain was like the search for the Holy Grail. At the beginning of the 18th century, Germans finally produced the first real porcelain. But even in the middle of the 18th century, a French confidence trickster, pretending to be Taiwanese, was still trying to sell the secrets of porcelain manufacture to English potteries, and in the late 18th century a scientist who accompanied Lord Macartney on his mission to visit the Emperor Qianlong wrote in his report that he regretted not having been able to see the Chinese making porcelain.

From the late 18th century onwards, the European market for Chinese export porcelain became highly competitive, and profits fell. The Dutch East India Company, which had dominated the porcelain trade for 200 years, fell into decline and was dissolved. By that time the European ceramics industry had gradually matured. But the new star of the seas, Britain, was feverishly engaged in the highly profitable tea trade.

The English bought tea from China in great quantities, "but what did we sell to them?" The Chinese emperor had insisted that "the Celestial Empire is rich in material goods and lacks nothing. We do not require the wares of foreign barbarians to make up for any deficiency." This being so, the way the British found to solve the problem of the trade deficit was of course to sell the tremendously lucrative opium, despite the Celestial Empire's ban on the drug. But that tale is not a pleasant one to recount.

Cornelis Pronk's "Four Doctors.".

If I wasn't real

"Looking back at the history of European countries' operations in the porcelain trade with China since the 16th century, it is also a history of invasion and occupation by the colonial powers.... The glittering gold coins in the coffers of the East India Company were the sweat and blood of our working people, which were plundered by the colonialists!" mainland Chinese scholar Zhu Peichu concludes with vehement indignation in a monograph published in 1984. Once again, the Chinese, whom the East Indian Company saw as a technologically advanced nation with unrivalled business acumen, have become tragically exploited coolies.

Porcelain's road to the West was a long and tortuous one. But who could have guessed that in the end it would make all the Chinese into self-doubting Lin Qinnans, and most Westerners into overbearing Robinson Crusoes? If long ago the Europeans had all taken Marco Polo for just a big liar, and had not had the idea of opening sea routes to pursue the beautiful fairy-tale of a thing named "china," as white and shimmering as a cowrie shell, might it not still be shining with discreet confidence far away across the sea?

[Picture Caption]

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Chinese porcelain dressed up in gold and silver. This pair of porcelain vases in the Palace of Versailles was a gift from the Emperor Kangxi.

After making its way across the broad oceans, Oriental porcelain became a symbol of power and wealth in European royal palaces. Pictured at left is a gallery in the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich, Germany.

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The National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam was formerly the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company, which once dominated the sea trade with the Orient.

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Blue-and-white porcelain plates decorated with flower motifs in panels are typical examples of carrack ware. The letters VOC form the insignia of the Dutch East India Company.

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A model of a 17th-century Dutch East India Company merchantman.

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Rare and beautiful Oriental porcelain has long been a favorite decoration in European drawing rooms.

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From the drawing room to the dining table, from condiment dishes to fork handles, blue-and-white porcelain is everywhere. The picture at left shows a reconstructed 18th-century interior in the Princesshof in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands.

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Dr. C.J.A. Jorg, Head of Collections at the Groningen Museum in the Netherlands, with some of the "hidden beauties" of the museum's holdings.

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Chinese porcelain from the wreck of the Geldermalsen. After two centuries at the bottom of the sea, it finally arrived in Holland as ordered.

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Lotus shapes and panel decorations are typical of Chinese export porcelain from the Wanli reign.

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Just to remind you what genuine, original Chinese porcelain looks like: a 12thcentury oval narcissus dish from the Ru imperial kiln of the Northern Song dynasty, regarded as the creme de la creme of porcelain.

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A scene from mythology--or an excuse for pornography?

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Erotic tableware. (courtesy of the National Museum of History)

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Armorial porcelain bearing the crest of the City of Groningen.

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The Crucifixion, Chinese style.

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The plate reads: "By God! My shares are all worthless!"

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Cornelis Pronk's "Four Doctors."

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The Rotterdam riot. Citizens are demolishing the house of the chief of police.

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When the English Captain George Anson put into the Chinese coast for provisions in 1743 he brought back this dinner service emblazoned with his family coat of arms. The description of China in Voyage Round the World by one of Anson's crew is seen as the beginning of the end of China's image as an earthly paradise. (photo by Vincent Chang)

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In the late 18th century as European porcelain gradually matured, Britain concentrated on the tea trade, and imports of Chinese porcelain declined greatly. Our picture shows a German Meissen figurine.

Fact File

Shared vs. separate origins

The origins and definition of porcelain have long been disputed and no definitive answer seems possible. But the development of both earthenware and porcelain has centered on the selection of raw materials and improvements in firing and kilns. Scholars who support the traditional view that earthenware and porcelain derive from the same source believe that porcelain developed from earthenware. By the Shang and Zhou period (17th to 3rd centuries BC) the pottery of the primitive age had been developed into glazed pottery. From then on the ferrous content in the body and the glaze was continuously reduced, until celadon ware gradually emerged in the Wei and Jin period (220-420AD). This was when the Chinese completed the period of transition from earthenware to porcelain.

Scholars who reject the above scenario believe, on the basis of many recent archeological finds, that earthenware and porcelain are quite separate. The two are made from completely different materials--whatever glaze is applied to potter's clay, and however high the temperature at which it is fired, it cannot be made into porcelain, and china clay fired at a low temperature will not make earthenware. Since chemical analysis has shown that the green-glazed ware of the Shang and Zhou was already close to porcelain, it should be regarded as a primitive porcelain. This version pushes the origins of Chinese porcelain right back to the Shang and Zhou period.

China clay vs. potter's clay

Porcelain is fired from chinastone and china clay, which are composed of kaolinite, feldspars and quartz in compositions which vary according to their source. Potter's clays on the other hand contain clay, sometimes with small amounts of kaolin.

The definition of porcelain is still a matter of some dispute, but in China the usual distinguishing criteria are that porcelain is fired from china clay at high temperatures over 1200°C (earthenware is fired at around 700-800°, or sometimes up to 1000°); its surface is vitrified by the high kiln temperature (earthenware may be unglazed or sealed by a low-temperature glaze); and its body is pure white in color, is translucent, has low porosity, and rings brightly when tapped.

Thus some scholars take the view that earthenware and porcelain have different origins in terms of their raw materials, but that the techniques used to fire them probably evolved from a common source.

[Picture Caption]

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A Chinese Yixing teapot? No, this is a red stoneware pot from Delft. (courtesy of Groningen Museum)

Fact File

Hard paste vs. soft paste

(Wang Jiafong/tr.by Robert Taylor)

In the West, ceramics are traditionally categorized in a different way. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, what is usually called hard-paste porcelain or true porcelain is fired from a mixture of ground chinastone (a feldspathic rock) and china clay (kaolin), at temperatures up to 1450°C .

China's earliest true porcelain appeared in the Tang dynasty, in the 8th century AD, while in Europe it was the German alchemist Bottger who first successfully produced a true porcelain with a quality approaching that of Chinese ware, in the early 18th century.

In contrast with hard-paste porcelain, soft-paste porcelain, also termed artificial porcelain, was a hard pottery produced by Europeans before they succeeded in making true porcelain. It was made by firing a mixture of ground glass and clay at 1200°C . The first was made by the Medicis of Florence in the 16th century. Soft-paste porcelains were also made in France in the 17th century and in England in the 18th century.

Soft-paste porcelain can be cut into tiles, while true porcelain cannot.

Majolica vs. faience

Majolica is a tin-glazed earthenware which can be decorated with colors, and is distinct from the rough, lead-glazed earthenwares which were current in Europe from the Middle Ages. The technique of making majolica was first passed from Moorish Spain to Italy via the island of Majorca in the 13th century. In Italy the technique was developed and transmitted to other countries throughout Europe.

In the 16th century potters from the Faenza area of Italy migrated to Spain, Holland and France, and from then on this type of ware came to be known as faience (from Faenza). In France, faience gradually moved away from the richly colored Italian-style decorations to rustic scenes; in the 17th century, imitations of Chinese blue-and-white ware became popular; and in the 18th century, Oriental-style and rococo patterns were developed using enamel colors.

Dutch Delft ware is a faience in terms of its materials, but in the 17th century the town's potters gradually developed a thin-bodied, fine ware with refined decoration, which was a competent imitation of Kangxi blue-and-white ware. In the 18th century, Delft imitated Japanese Imari polychrome ware and Chinese polychrome ware.

English faience was much influenced by Italian majolica and Dutch Delft ware, and is sometimes simply referred to as "delft."

Stoneware vs. bone china

There are also two types of ware whose characteristics fall part way between earthenware and porcelain. Stoneware is fired at around 1100°C from a mixture of clay and a fusible rock. It is hard but not translucent. By Western definitions, white stoneware appeared in China by the 15th century BC, during the Shang dynasty. The encyclopedias also note that in the 17th century, when China tea was sold into Europe, an Yixing red stoneware teapot was sent in each chest. These pots were soon imitated in Germany, England and Holland. In other words, unglazed Yi xing pots, and the red clay wares developed in Delft and by Bottger in Germany, are all stoneware.

Bone china is sometimes also called English china. Starting from the 1750s, the English gradually began adding bone ash, mainly from cattle bones, as a flux to make the body harder and translucent. In 1794 Josiah SpodeII added bone ash to the raw hard-paste clay batch to develop a tougher, ivorycolored china. This is seen by some as the beginning of true porcelain manufacture in England. Encyclopedia Britannica notes that bone china has become the standard British porcelain. Generally speaking, bone china is most popular in Britain and the USA, while true porcelain is preferred in continental Europe.

Sources: Collection of Papers on Ancient Chinese Ceramics (China Silicates Institute, 1988); Dictionary of Chinese Arts (Hsiung Shih Art Books); Encyclopedia Britannica; Encyclopedia Americana; Encyclopedia of Ceramics (Thames & Hudson).

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A tulip vase from Delft? No: it's an imitation from Jingdezhen, China. (courtesy of Groningen Museum)

A tulip vase from Delft? No: it's an imitation from Jingdezhen, China. （courtesy of Groningen Museum）

When the English Captain George Anson put into the Chinese coast for provisions in 1743 he brought back this dinner service emblazoned with his family coat of arms. The description of China in Voyage Round the World by one of An son's crew is seen as the beginning of the end of China's image as an earthly paradise. （photo by Vincent Chang）

In the late 18th century as European porcelain gradually matured, Britain concentrated on the tea trade, and imports of Chinese porcelain declined greatly. Our picture shows a German Meissen figurine.