The Art and Culture of Anchient Chinese Porcelain

In May 1936 the steamship Sorrento sailed into the port of Piraeus, Greece. Aboard were sixteen crates with 452 items of Chinese pottery, destined to join another 341 already on display at the Benaki Museum in Athens. Over the past nine years the museum’s founder, Antonis Benakis, had been in contact with their donor, Greek-origin British businessman George Eumorfopoulos. His Chinese art collection was one of the most extensive the world had ever seen. In bestowing this gift, Eumorfopoulos wanted to introduce Greeks to the art of China through its best-known medium at the time, ceramics.

The years after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 witnessed an ‘opening up’ of China and the first archaeological excavations of its ancient cultures. A circle of enthusiasts and scholars, among which Eumorfopoulos was pivotal, grasped the opportunity to evaluate anew long-held preconceptions on Chinese civilisation. Situated in London, a centre of imperialist power and global finance, they acquired, assessed, and interpreted previously-unseen and fascinating objects. In addition, Eumorfopoulos acted as an intermediary between the contemporary art scene and Chinese antiquities, inspiring modern artists and ‘studio potters’.

China Rediscovered: The Benaki Museum Collection of Chinese Ceramics traces the roles ceramics assumed in this cultural interplay within the context of earlier encounters between China and the rest of the world. A selection of 88 items from the Benaki Museum are perceived as ‘actors’ within constantly evolving ‘sets’, as players in a game of knowledge, taste, and power.

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Museums around the world all share in a common purpose: To enrich our lives through the collection, research, and display of our histories, arts, and cultures. With this as our guiding star, Guangzhou Oriental Museum has struck out on an international course in the research of Chinese ceramics, thus refining a new method of ceramic research, Ceramics Trace Model Study.  This report is a mere glimpse into the concept, strategy, and focus of this method, as well as a progress report of the research and publications to date.

“Grounded in Heritage” is a Master’s project derived from part of the researcher’s Post-Graduate Diploma research based on the Jingdezhen porcelain cluster, which challenges Michael Porter’s “Competitive Advantage of Nations” model as well as investigating whether Western cluster theories are applicable to Chinese traditional cultural clusters, and how Chinese traditional cultural clusters will contribute to cluster research as a whole. Jingdezhen porcelain is an icon of Chinese traditional culture clusters, with a recorded history of over 2,200 years. “Chang Nan” – the ancient name of the city – was pronounced by foreign buyers as “china”, indicating the importance of the products of this cluster in creating the world’s image of China. In comparison, the earliest cluster example presented in Porter’s book Competitive Advantage of Nations (Porter, 1990) has a history of only about 400 years. When considering the duration of its history and the uniqueness of Chinese culture, deeper research into the Jingdezhen porcelain cluster is expected to contribute to the current body of knowledge regarding clusters.
In order to reveal the characteristics of the entire porcelain cluster, including aspects such as the business environment, business network, business operations, coordination techniques, and production procedures, Grounded Theory is employed. Grounded Theory is considered to be the most rigorous suitable analysis method, freeing researchers from theoretical restrictions while aiming for a more holistic view of the research target. Research methods complementary to Grounded Theory were utilised for data collection: interviews, observation, field notes, and historiography. Due to the complexity of this project and the multiple research methods employed, the data is classified into divisions. The main data library for Grounded Theory is compiled from three streams of first hand data: interviews conducted in Beijing; interviews conducted in Jingdezhen; and field notes from both places. The data collected through historiography is subsumed into “extant literature” (see Figure 9). The three sets of data in the data library are inter-dependent and are coded separately; therefore, the examination of theoretical saturation is not only confirmed by its own stream, but also examined by data from historiography.
Thirteen key categories arise from coding of the data. From these categories, nine distinctive figures are generated based on eight categories with the five remaining categories leading to five conceptual findings, all presented in Chapter Five. Due to the novel approach taken to Grounded Theory, this project also presents a contribution in the application of Grounded Theory in industry and cluster research, as well as combining a variety of research methods together with Grounded Theory. The findings extend but do not conflict with classic cluster literature, and include outcomes specific to the cluster examined. Limitations and potential future research are discussed at the end of this report.

A taste for Chinese design was manifested in Iranian objects commissioned by Armenian traders in seventeenth-century Isfahan. A century later, their scions dispersed along trade routes and many settled in India. Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century these Indian Armenians placed orders for ‘Chinese export wares’ featuring signs of their Armenian ethnicity. Living within European cultural horizons, they adapted to western modes and sometimes used Latin monograms. Dignitaries of the Armenian millet under the Ottoman sultan also indulged in Chinese luxuries, which reflect the destinies of Armenian communities both in their Caucasian homeland and in diaspora.

A term used by local artisans of Jingdezhen pottery workshops and kilns—the insiders— describes the outsiders, the throngs of visiting artists, curators, researchers and writers: they are jingpiao, or “Jingdezhen drifters’. The expression derives from an earlier idiom. Beipiao, meaning “northern drifters’, was common parlance in the 1990s and described
young artists, musicians and other creatives who drifted into Beijing to make a precarious living there. Today, the term jingpiao describes all the waidiren or outsiders— Chinese or foreign—who find themselves in Jingdezhen. Why does this small, prefecture level city in one of China’s poorest provinces draw so many people from across the globe? To find out more, I’ve spoken with four artists who make work there, or whose
work is in some way inspired by their time there. Liu Jianhua and Geng Xue, whose work is held in the White Rabbit Collection, are discussed in detail, while the Australians Merran Esson and Juz Kitson provide a different point of view. I asked each artist to tell me why Jingdezhen exerts such a gravitational pull on Chinese artists immersed in their
own thousand-year-long porcelain history and on foreign visitors.

The microstructures of porcelain and stoneware bodies from north and south China, spanning the period from the Tang to the Ming dynasty (7th–17th centuries ad), were examined in polished sections in a scanning electron microscope (SEM) after etching the sections with hydrofluoric acid (HF). Mullite, present as fine, mainly elongated crystals, is the dominant crystalline phase observed. The bulk chemical compositions of the bodies are determined by energy-dispersive spectrometry in the SEM, and the relative amounts of mullite and quartz present in the different ceramics are estimated from X-ray diffraction measurements. Mullite formed from areas of kaolinitic clay, mica particles and feldspar particles is distinguished through a combination of the arrangement of the mullite crystals, and the associated SiO2/Al2O3 wt% concentration ratios. It is shown that very different microstructures are observed in ceramic bodies produced using kaolinitic clay from north China (Ding porcelain and Jun stoneware), porcelain stone from south China (qingbai and underglaze blue porcelain and Longquan stoneware), and stoneware clays from south China (Yue and Guan stonewares). Therefore, SEM examination of HF-etched, polished sections of the bodies of high-refractory ceramics has considerable potential for investigating the raw materials used in their production.

The microstructures of porcelain and stoneware bodies from north and south China, spanning the period from the Tang to the Ming dynasty (7th-17th centuries AD), were examined in polished sections in a scanning electron microscope (SEM) after etching the sections with hydrofluoric acid (HF). Mullite, present as fine, mainly elongated crystals, is the dominant crystalline phase observed. The bulk chemical compositions of the bodies are determined by energy-dispersive spectrometry in the SEM, and the relative amounts of mullite and quartz present in the different ceramics are estimated from X-ray diffraction measurements. Mullite formed from areas of kaolinitic clay, mica particles and feldspar particles is distinguished through a combination of the arrangement of the mullite crystals, and the associated SiO 2 /Al 2 O 3 wt% concentration ratios. It is shown that very different microstructures are observed in ceramic bodies produced using kaolinitic clay from north China (Ding porcelain and Jun stoneware), porcelain stone from south China (qingbai and underglaze blue porcelain and Longquan stoneware), and stoneware clays from south China (Yue and Guan stonewares). Therefore, SEM examination of HF-etched, polished sections of the bodies of high-refractory ceramics has considerable potential for investigating the raw materials used in their production.

The lid of a Chinese export teapot can tell us a lot.  This is the story of when the initial lid perforations (for the release of steam) were added to Chinese export teapots and why it was later than most would expect.  The work was presented at a Oriental Ceramics Society of London meeting.

The summery of a paper presented at the international symposium "Transmitters of Another Culture: Research on Japan-related Overseas Collections from the 19th Century" organized by the National Museum of Japanese History, held at the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Japan, 28-29 October, 2017.

Van 1998 tot 2004 voerde de Archeologische Dienst Waasland archeologisch onderzoek uit op de site Blauwhof in Steendorp (Temse). De site werd bedreigd door grootschalige klei-ontginning. Bij deze opgravingen werd onder meer porselein aangetroffen. Het porselein van deze site vormt een belangrijke schakel in de studie van porselein in Vlaanderen, omdat het hier om een landelijke site gaat, die door voorname personen bewoond werd. In deze bijdrage wordt het porselein behandeld dat afkomstig is uit de beerput en uit de vullingspakketten in de westelijke zone van de walgracht. Door de eerder korte vormingsduur van beide vondstcomplexen, leveren ze een interessante bijdrage tot de kennis van het voorkomen van porselein in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden. Het aangetroffen porselein is beperkt tot eet- en drinkgerei, met een blauwe decoratie in onderglazuur, al dan niet gecombineerd met onderglazuur bruin. De datering van het porselein ligt hoofdzakelijk tussen het tweede en het derde kwart van de 18de eeuw. Ook zijn enkele voorwerpen uit de 17de eeuw aanwezig, die in verband gebracht kunnen worden met de familie Ximenez, die in deze periode het hof van plaisantie in Steendorp bewoonde.

Bruggeman J. 2015:'Het porselein van het Blauwhof in Steendorp (Temse)', in: Relicta. Archeologie, Monumenten- en Landschapsonderzoek in Vlaanderen, volume 12, pp. 267-282, Brussel, 2015.
ISSN 1783 6425

Dit artikel is geschreven voor Terra Nigra, het archeologisch magazine van AWN-afdeling Helinium in Vlaardingen. In het artikel worden diverse Aziatisch porseleinen objecten uit opgravingen in de regio besproken.

This article (Dutch) was for 'Terra Nigra', an archaeological magazine from a local society in Vlaardingen (near Rotterdam), the Netherlands. In this article five porcelain objects are being explained within their context.