1_ the pilgrim art

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous supportof the Simpson Humanities Endowment Fund of theUniversity of California Press Foundation.


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The Pilgrim Art


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THE CALIFOR NIA WORLD HISTORY LIBRARYEdited by Edmund Burke III, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Patricia Seed

. The Unending Frontier: Environmental History of the Early Modern World, by John F.

Richards. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, by David Christian. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, by Engseng Ho. Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 18601920, by Thomas R. Metcalf . Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, edited by Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker

. Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization, by Jeremy Prestholdt

. Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History, edited by Anne Walthall

. Island World: A History of Hawaii and the United States, by Gary Y. Okihiro

. The Environment and World History, edited by Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz. Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones, by Gary Y. Okihiro. The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History, by Robert Finlay . The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the AmericanCentury, by Sebastian Conrad; translated by Alan Nothnagle. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 18601914, by Ilham

Khuri-Makdisi. The Other West: Latin America from Invasion to Globalization, Marcello Carmagnani


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The Pilgrim ArtCultures of Porcelain in World History

Robert Finlay

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSBerkeley Los Angeles London


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University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancingscholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Itsactivities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropiccontributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California PressBerkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.London, England

by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataFinlay, Robert, 1940.

The pilgrim art : Cultures of porcelain in world history / Robert Finlay.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-520-24468-9 (cloth : alk. paper)1. Porcelain industryChinaSocial aspectsHistory. 2. Porcelain,

ChineseSocial aspectsHistory. 3. PorcelainSocial aspectsHistory. 4. Art and society. I. Title.HD9610.8.C62F56 2010338.4'766650951dc22 2009040698

Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is printed on Cascades Enviro , a % post consumer waste,recycled, de-inked ber. FSC recycled certi ed and processed chlorine free.It is acid free, Ecologo certi ed, and manufactured by BioGas energy.


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List of Illustrations xiNote on Terminology xiii Acknowledgments xv

Introduction The Pilgrim Flask of Philip II

Chinese Porcelain and Cross-Cultural Exchange

The Cultural Signicance of Chinese Porcelain

The Fall of China and the Rise of the West

. The Porcelain City: Jingdezhen in the Eighteenth Century The Town of Year-Round Thunder and Lightning

Sending Porcelain to All Parts of the World

These Vessels Pass through So Many Hands

Chinese Workers Who Make Porcelain

Miracle-Fanciers: Faith and Furnace Transformation

God Had Kneaded Some Clay: The Divinities of Pottery

From Jingdezhen to the Sea

. The Secrets of Porcelain: China and the West in the Eighteenth Century

The Land of Promise: China and the West An Abyss for Gold and Silver: Asian Trade and the West

The Porcelain King: August II of Saxony


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To Tell of the Porcelain Made There: The Secrets of Jingdezhen 65The White Porcelain Shell: From Marco Polo to Rococo 69Neptune and Vulcan: Early Modern Science and the Secrets of Porcelain 74

Volcanoes and Vases: Charles Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood 77

. The Creation of Porcelain: China and Eurasia, . . . . .Earthenware, Stoneware, and Porcelain 81Tectonic Plates, Volcanoes, and Yellow Earth 85Pottery and Metallurgy in China 89The Creation of Tang Porcelain: Pottery from the Bronze Age to the Tang 92Yellow China and Blue China: Land and Sea in East and West 95

The Silk Road: China and Southwest Asia in the Tang 100Eurasian Cultural Exchange in the Tang 103

. The Culture of Porcelain in China: Commerce, Confucians,and Connoisseurs, Commerce 107 Confucians 112

Copying the Ancient 115Connoisseurs and the Culture of Tea 123Porcelain and Doctor Good Tea 128Connoisseurs and the Culture of Porcelain 131Connoisseurs and the Culture of Jade 133The Creation of Jingdezhen Porcelain 136

. The Creation of Blue-and-White Porcelain: Muslims,Mongols, and Eurasian Cultural Exchange, 139Chinese Trade and Southwest Asia 140The Expansion of Islam in Maritime Asia 143Song Porcelain and Southwest Asian Pottery 147 The Mongols and Eurasian Unication 150Eurasian Cultural Exchange in the Age of the Mongols 153The Origins of Blue-and-White Porcelain 158The Triumph of Blue-and-White Porcelain in China 161Porcelain Art and Cross-Cultural Exchange 166

The Encounter of Southwest Asian and Chinese Design 169


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. The Primacy of Chinese Porcelain: Korea, Japan,and Continental Southeast Asia, 175

First under Heaven: The Culture of Porcelain in Korea 177

Chinese Objects: The Culture of China in Japan 183The Culture of Porcelain in Japan 189Porcelain, Politics, and the Japanese Tea Ceremony 193

Earths Right for Pots and Ceramics: Vietnam and China 202Goods from China: Kingdoms of the Khmer and Thai 207 An Imitator of the Kings of Asia: Louis XIV in 1686 211

. The Triumph of Chinese Porcelain: Maritime Southeast Asia,

the Indian Ocean, and Southwest Asia, 214Trade and Tribute in China 215The Treasure Ships of Zheng He, 14051433 217 Porcelain Trade in Maritime Southeast Asia 223The Culture of Porcelain in Maritime Southeast Asia 228The Culture of Porcelain on the Swahili Coast 233

I Thought All India a China Shop 238The Culture of Porcelain in Timurid Persia 240Porcelain and the Mughals: India from Babur to Aurangzeb, 15261707 245The Culture of Porcelain in the Ottoman Empire 248

The Making of Earthen Pots: The Hispano-Moresque Legacy 250

. The Decline and Fall of Chinese Porcelain: The West and the World,

So Empires Are Exchanged: The Portugueseand the Dutch in East Asia 254

Where Prot Calls: China, the Dutch,and the International Pottery Market 258Tableware of Europe: Earthenware, Pewter, and Silver 261

Together at Table: From Communal to Individual Dining 264The Last Stage of Polite Entertainments: Cuisine and Table Decoration 269The Contagion of China Fancy: Collecting and Creating Porcelain 273Western and Chinese Porcelain in the Eighteenth Century 277

Porcelain Elephants and China Gods: The Declineof Chinese Porcelain in the West 282


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Josiah Wedgwood, Vase Maker General of the Universe 288No More from China, China Bring: The Decline of Chinese Porcelainin the World 292

Epilogue: The Pilgrim Art 297

Notes 307 References 337 Index 391


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MAPS

Map . Europe xviiMap . Asia xviii

PLATES following page 172

. Chinese blue-and-white pilgrim ask, Ming dynasty ( )

. Detail of painting by Willem Kalf ( )

. Chinese gure of Guanyin, Qing dynasty, th th century

. Thai kendi, th th century

. German plate, Meissen manufactory, ca.

. Chinese armorial teapot, teabowl, saucer, and milk jug, Qing dynasty,ca.

. English triple shell dish, Plymouth-Bristol manufactory, ca.

. German clock, Meissen manufactory, ca.

. Chinese blue-and-white vase, Ming dynasty, Wanli period ( ). Pair of Chinese celadon dishes, Qing dynasty . English teapot, Worcester manufactory, ca. . Chinese lidded box, Southern Song dynasty ( ). Chinese blue-and-white ask, Ming dynasty . Chinese blue-and-white bowl, Ming dynasty . Chinese blue-and-white dish, Ming dynasty . Chinese blue-and-white dish, Yuan dynasty, th century

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. Korean blue-and-white bottle, Choson dynasty, ca.

. Japanese blue-and-white ewer, Edo period, ca.

. Japanese blue-and-white plate for the VOC, ca.

. German saucer, Meissen manufactory, ca. . A collection of blue-and-white pottery, th th century

. Persian plate, Safavid period, th century

. Ottoman plate, late th century

. Chinese blue-and-white plate, Ming dynasty, ca.


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CERAMICS

The distinctions amongearthenware, stoneware,and porcelain,in terms of appear-ance, ring range, and material composition, are explained in the opening sectionof chapter . Earthenware covered with a tin-based glaze is known as maiolica inSpain and Italy, faiencein France, anddelftwarein Holland and England. Althoughthere are only negligible differences among these wares, the terms are employedherefor varietyof languageand ease ofexposition.Chinawarealways refers toporce-lain exported from China.

GEOGRAPHY

SouthwestAsiaisusedinsteadof MiddleEast;westernAsiaencompassesbothSouth-

west Asia and Europe from the period after the collapse of the Roman Empire inthe fth century. Maritime Southeast Asia, the chain of islands stretching from thePhilippines to Sumatra, is also called the Archipelago. Eurasia is characterized asthe ecumenefrom an ancient Greek term for the inhabited or known quartersof the worldand should be understood as including the northern and easterncoasts of Africa.

PRINCIPAL CHINESE DYNASTIES

Shang, ca. . . .Zhou, . . .Qin, . . .

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Han, . . . . .Sui, Tang

Song, Northern Song, Southern Song, Yuan (or Mongol), Ming, Qing (or Manchu),

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I should like to thank Mimi Gardner Gates, directorof the Seattle Art Museum, forinviting me to participate in the conference Porcelain Stories from China to Eu-rope inMarch . Asshe and JulieEmerson,curatorofdecorative arts,explained,an essay I wrote on the global in uence of Chinese porcelain played a role in in-spiring theexhibition.The conference represents myonly exposure to thecongenialworld of porcelain scholars and a cionados, so I am especially grateful for the in- vitation. Moreover, the museum kindly permitted me to reproduce images fromthe exhibition catalogue for the present bookthe sort of round-robin exchangethat nicely re ects the circuit of cultural in uence typical of porcelain across thecenturies. A glance at the references makes clear how much this book depends ontheworkofcountlessstudentsofporcelain.Asanoutlander to the subject, I brazenly used their publications for my own purposes while never forgetting how much I

am indebted to the labors of those more expert authorities. I wish to thank GeorgeHuppert, editor of the Journal of the Historical Society (TJHS) for permission to in-corporate parts ofmyarticle, TheVoyages ofZheng He: Ideology, State Power, andMaritime Trade in Ming China, TJHS / ( ): , into chapter of thisbook. I am also grateful to Jerry Bentley, editor of the Journal of World History (JWH), for permission to use an article, with the same title as the present work,published in JWH / ( ): . Rose Kerr, formerly Keeper of the Far East-ern Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and an expert once-ramic technology, provided helpful criticism of that article when we met at Cam-bridgeUniversityin .IamalsoobligedtotheDeansOf ceofFulbrightCollege,University of Arkansas, for a grant to assist in the collection of images from theSeattle Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Peabody Essex Mu-

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seum, Salem, Massachusetts. Jiang Jin, once my graduate student and now a fac-ulty member at East China Normal University, Shanghai, provided invaluable as-sistance inhelping medeal with materials in the Chinese language. William H.Mc-

Neill greatly encouraged meafter readingthemanuscript, recognizing that althoughthe discussion at times seemed to stray from the subject of porcelain, it turned outto be carefully plotted meandering. In addition, his prodigious labors as a worldhistorian have been my model of excellence since he served long ago as my disser-tation director at the University of Chicago.

My daughter Conwill sustainedmewithher companionship and good cheer dur-ing the writing of this book. My family at all times has shown heartening interestin my research, despite the curious byways down which it sometimes led me. Con-stance has been an invariable source of support and affection, and, as always, sheremains my ideal reader. I owe a great deal to our daughter Adrianne, who appliedher exceptional writing skills to editing the text and eliminating many stylistic fail-ings. At every stage of my work, her sister, Caitlin, has helped track down out-of-the-way references and publications, despite the demands on her time in Olin Li-brary at Cornell University, the marvelous and hospitable institution where muchof my research was carried out. Dedicating this book to Caitlin is the most pleas-ing aspect of having nished it at last.

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SCOTLAND

ENGLAND

FRANCE

PORTUGAL

SPAIN

MAJORCA

ITALY

NETHERLANDS

GERMANY

AUSTRIA

BRANDENBURG-PRUSSIA

SAXONY

BAVARIA

Madrid(Buen Retiro)

Manises

Valencia

Lisbon

Orlans

Chantilly

Paris (Saint-Cloud,Vincennes

Svres)

Mennecy

Plymouth

London(Bow, Chelsea,

Vauxhall)

WorcesterDerby

STAFFORDSHIRE

Edinburgh

DelftFrstenburg

MeissenDresden

LimbachKloster-Veilsdorf

FuldaHochsi

KelsierbachFrankenthal

LudswigsburgStrasbourg

AugsburgNymphenburg

Vienna

Venice

FlorenceDoccia Urbino

Deruta

Rome

Naples

Herculaneum

0

0 300 km

200 mi

N

. Europe


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P A C I F I C

O C E A N

M E D I T

E R R A

N E A N

S E A

B L A C

K

C A S P I A N S E A

R E D

S E A

P E R S I A N

G U L F

I N D I A N

O C E A N

B e i j i n g ( P e k i n g

( D a d u )

C i z h o u

N a n j i n g

H a n g z h o u

S h a n g h a i

N i n g b u

J i n g d e z h e n

F u z h o u

J i z h o u

C h a n g s h a

Q u a n z h o u

( Z a y t u n )

T o n g a n

S w a t o w

G u a n g z h o u

( C a n t o n )

M a n i l a

C a r a g i a n

T o l o n i a n

C a u c i g a

M a l a c c a

S i n g a p o r e

M a l e

Q u i l o n K a

y a l

M a n t s i

N a g a p a t t i n a m

G a o

C a l i c u t

M a d r a s

C a m b a y

B r o a c h

B r a h m i n a b a d

D e l h i

D a y b u l

M u s c a t

S o h a r

H o r m u z K

i r m a n

N i s h a p u r

S a m a r k a n d

B u k h a r a

K a s h a n

I s f a h a n

S a m a r r a

B a g h d a d

A r d e b i l I s

t a k h i

S h i r a z

S i r a f

T a b r i z

D a m a s c u s

J e r u s a l e m

J i d d a h

M e c c a

D h o f a r

A d e n

M o g a d i s h u

A i d h a b

Q u s e i r

F u s r a t

( C a i r o )

H a m a

A l e p p o

K u b a c h i

I z n i k

K r a h y a I s

t a n b u l

V e n i c e

I N N E R M O N G O L I A

L I A O N I N G

J A P A N

K O R E A

S I N A N

T A I W A N

P H I L I P P I N E S

V I E T N

A M

Y U N N A N

B E N G A L

Y E M E N

E G Y P T

I R A Q

T U R K E Y

A R M E N I A

S R I L A N K A

M A L D I V E S

I S L A N D S

B O R N E O

S U M A T

R A

O x u s

E u p h r a t e s

Tigris

N i l e

I n d u s

G a n g

e s

Y a n

g t z e

Y e l l o

w

0 0

5 0 0

1 0 0 0 k m

3 0 0

6 0 0 m i

N

R U S S I A

T I B E T

C H I N A

I N D I A

T H A I L A N D

P E R S I A

A R A B I A

A F R I C A

. A s i a


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Introduction

In Philip II of Spain was buried in the Escorial palace north of Madrid in acof n made from the keel of the Cinco Chagas de Cristo, a vessel that had served asthe agship of ve viceroys of Goa in India, the center of the Portuguese maritimeempire in Asia. Sailing for the Portuguese crown for over a quarter of a century,the teak-built carrack had made about nine round-trip voyages between Goa andLisbon, twice as many as the usual transport. The two legs of the carreira da n-dia,roadway to India, added up to , kilometers, a journey that took at leasteighteenmonthsand levieda frightful toll in men and vessels.AlthoughPortugueseseamen piously declared that God takes them out and God brings them back, thenumber shipwrecked or lost on the return voyage, when captains invariably over-loaded their vessels with Asian merchandise, was disproportionately great.1 Per-haps Philip, who believed that Providence guided his realm, considered that the

fortunateCinco Chagas,namedfor theFive Wounds of theCruci xion,hadbene-ted from the same dispensation. The great carrack also evoked a global vista thatappealed to the king, for mariners celebrated it as a remarkable link between Eastand West, connecting the far sides of the world just as the lordship of Philip him-self had done in life. The monarch, who paid exacting attention to mortuary de-tails,evidentlyregardedhiscarrack cof n in theclaustrophobic,subterranean vaultof the Escorial as an emblem of his wide-ranging dominion.

The Cinco Chagas had been moored in Lisbon harbor for some years beforePhilip II died, serving a degrading retirement as a demasted storage hulk. Themonarch could appropriate its keel for his tombbecause twentyyears earlier hehadseized Portugal after King Sebastian I (r. ), the last of the Avis dynasty, andseven thousand of his nobles were slaughtered at the battle of Alczar-Quibir in


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Morocco. Uniting Portuguese and Spanish territories in his own person, with pos-sessions inEurope, the Americas,Africa, India, and SoutheastAsia, Philip thuscameto rule the rst global empire. One of the triumphal arches lining his ceremonial

entry into Lisbon in carried a legend proclaiming him lord of everything inthe East and West.2 For contemporaries who shared his pious outlook, PhilipspowerandwealthseemedtobringwithinreachtheancientChristiandreamofuni- versal imperium, mankind united under one crown and one faith; hope soaredamong them that heretics and in dels nally would be crushed. The kings Mexi-can and Peruvian mines produced tons of silver that subsidized Spanish powerthroughout Europe, includingwaragainst Protestant rebels in theNetherlandsandOttomanTurks in theMediterranean.Some ofPhilips military commandersurgedthat he follow up the conquest of Portugal by invading Elizabethan England.

Thecommercialnetworksof the Iberian kingdoms meant that Philipcontrolledthe worlds most lucrative maritime trade, including that in pepper and spice fromIndia to Europe, in silk and silver between China and Japan, and in slaves and goldbetween Africa and the New World. Walter Raleigh ( ) recognized theeconomicsigni canceofmaritime supremacy: Hee that commaunds thesea, com-maundsthetrade,andheethatisLordofthetradeoftheworldeisLordofthewealthof the worlde.3 Philip IIs American silver streamed around the globe, quickeningeconomic activity in India, Southeast Asia, and China. To the despair of the DutchandtheEnglish,hisshipsdominatedtheIndianOceanandAtlantic.Theyalsohelda monopoly on voyaging across the Paci c, though Francis Drake (ca. )made a lone incursion there in in the Golden Hind during his famous cir-cumnavigation of the world. A raid he planned on Manila, the Spanish head-quarters in the Philippine Islands, never cameoff, but nearPanamahecaptured theSpanish Cacafuego, which carried bales of silk, twenty-six tons of gold, and fteenhundred porcelains. He traded much of the latter to Miwok Indians, near what isnow San Francisco Bay, and later he presented several impressive items to QueenElizabeth I (r. ) aftergrandly sailing uptheThames,his rigging festooned

with colorful Chinese silks.4

His world-girdling triumph no doubt forti ed Drake, for he shared Philip IIsprovidential perspective on human affairs. Our enemies are many, he said, butOur Protector commandeth the world.5 In general, however, the deity seemed tobe favoring Spain. In the Mediterranean in 7 , with the aid of Venetian and pa-pal galleys, Philip in icted a sensational defeat on the Ottoman navy at Lepanto,off the coast of Greece. Some of the Muslim veterans of that encounter ended upin the Philippines a few years later, ready to ght the Spanish on the battle eld of Southeast Asia. Ruler of the rst global empire, Philip found himself engaged inthe rst world war.6

For some of the kings servants, the union of Spain and Portugal suggested abreathtaking project. In the decade after Sebastian fell in battle, administrators in

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Manila repeatedly urged Philip to launch the conquest of China from there, ex-panding his wealthand power toan incomparableextent. A memorial of 86 fromthe governing council ofManilaargued thatasa consequence ofholding the Philip-

pines, there is offered to his Majesty the greatest occasion and the grandest be-ginning that ever in the world was offered to a monarch.7 Yet, though a medalwith Philips portrait aunted the legend Non Sufcit Orbis (The World Is NotEnough) after the takeover of Portugal, the monarch in fact decided that he had asuf ciency.8 Bedeviled by rebellion in the Netherlands and cobbling together anarmada to invadeProtestantEngland in , hedid not think itprudent tomarchinto China. In fact, he sided with the view that the Philippines provided a com-mand center for spiritual rather than military conquest: Jesuit priests and mendi-cant friars working for the conversion of China and Japan would receive crucialsupport from the strategically located possession, a pendant of Christianity sus-pended off the Asian mainland.9

Philip also saw the Philippines as commercially valuable, even though the is-lands lackedpro tablenative products.A stronghold there, only twoweeks sea jour-ney from the Chinese coast, would circumvent the Portuguese monopoly on tradewith China. Miguel Lpezde Legazpi ( ), the conqueror of the islands, pre-dicted in that we shall gain the commerce with China, whence come silks,porcelains, benzoin, musk, and other articles.10 Soon after, the rst of many Span-ish galleons carrying Chinese merchandise left Manila for Acapulco (Mexico), itscargo paid for by silver from the New World. As ruler of Portugal after , how-ever, Philip also could command agents inMacao, the Portuguesetrading post nearCanton (Guangzhou) in southern China. A modest advantage of this extension of power was that the king could order porcelains at their source for the rst time.

THE PILGRIM FLASK OF PHILIP II

The greatest art patron of the century, with a collection of fteen hundred paint-

ings as well as numerous manuscripts, prints, tapestries, clocks, jewelry, and exoticnatural specimens, Philip had long admired and purchased Chinese porcelain. Inthe shedirected theearthenwarepottersofTalaverade la Reina, a townninety-

ve kilometers southwest of Madrid, to turn out blue-and-white tiles for the Esco-rial in imitation of the dominant color scheme of Chinese ceramics. He believedthat blue and white suited the sober architecture of his palace better than the am-boyant Italo-Flemish style of polychrome decoration. In Portugal for his corona-tion in , he stayed in the royal Santos Palace in Lisbon, where blue-and-whiteporcelainssumptuouslyadorned the ceilingofa domed room. After the union withPortugal, a ood of blue-and-white Lisbon earthenware entered Spanish cities,where buyers referred to it generically as mariposas (butter ies) because of a com-mon decorative motifcopied fromChinese porcelain.Philip fosteredgood relations

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withalliesandclientsinEuropebysendinggifts,oftenofporcelain.HiscousinArch-duke Ferdinand II of Austria ( ) also received some Aztec feather-work,looted by conquistadors decades earlier, which he put on display in akunstkammer

(art cabinet) with his porcelains. By the time of his death, Philip owned the largestcollection of chinaware in Europe. According to an inventory of , it amountedto three thousand porcelains, most of them tableware, including serving platters,carafes, sauceboats, and wide-mouthed jars.11

Philippossessedanumberofidiosyncraticpieces,includingajarwithacrowneddouble-headed eagle clasping a heart pierced by arrows, a motif identi ed with theOrder of St. Augustine, a missionary society with many friars in the Philippines.But the most revealing porcelains were several known as pilgrim asks, almostcertainly commissioned after the union with Portugal. Like the cof n in the Esco-rial, the blue-and-white askhas global referents. It was red in the kilns of the city of Jingdezhen in southeastern China, the most important manufacturer of porce-lain since the fourteenth century. Two hundred years later, Westerners began com-missioning works there, though a Chinese broker in Canton probably relayed theorder for the kings ask to the potters. While obviously Chinese in its clay materi-als and craftsmanship, Philips ask otherwise re ects an extensive circuit of in-

uence. In form, color, and decoration, it represents the end product of centuriesof entwined traditions, industry, and artistry, the owing together of wide-rangingcultural currents. (See gure .)

Shaped much like a canteen, with a tall, tapering neck and attened sphericalbody, the pilgrim ask is decorated on one side with a portrait of a seated scholarand a servant boy in a rocky landscape, a theme combining elements from ancientPersia and Tang China.12 The arms of Spain, Castile and Len quarterly, appear onthe other side, most likely copied from a Spanish coin provided by Philips agentsin Macao or Manila. The slender, sloping sides of the piece are adorned with lotus-

ower patterns deriving from early Buddhist India; Chinese images of insects androcks line the neck. The white of the asks body may be traced to Chinese ceramic

imitations ofPersiansilverwork in theseventhcentury and, somewhat later, to sim-ulations in pottery of the lustrous sheen of pale jade from Central Asia. The blueshades on the ask derive from cobalt pigment blended from ore mined in Persiaand China, while the overall format of the ornament represents a convergence of Chinese and Islamic approaches to designand spatialorganization developedsincethe fourteenth century. In short, taken altogether, the pilgrim ask of Philip II is aproduct of Eurasian cross-cultural contact, a representative climax to centuries of long-distance interaction and mingled traditions.

European enthusiasm for Chinese porcelain represents a late episode in themillennium-long history of the ceramic. Peoples in the jungles of Borneo and thePhilippineshad been employing it for manycenturies; potters inKorea, Japan, Viet-nam, Egypt, and Iraq had been emulating it for a thousand years. But few pieces

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reached the West before the sixteenth century, and when they did, their ownerstreated them as cherished possessions, mounting them in precious metal and in-scribing them with heraldic crests. A land of drab earthenware during the Middle

Ages, Europe regarded porcelain with wonderand envy. WhenVasco da Gama (ca. ) sailed from Portugal in for his epoch-making voyage aroundAfrica to India, he had instructions from King Manuel I (r. ) to bringback the two things the West most desiredspices and porcelain. Two years later,having lost more than half of his men to disease and starvation, da Gama pre-sented the monarch with sacks of black pepper, cinnamon, and cloves, as well as adozen pieces of chinaware, the rst of million to be shipped to Europe over thenext three centuries. After Portuguesecaptains reached China in , Manuel or-dered a number of porcelains: the earliest known blue-and-white vessel with Euro-pean decoration is a ewer of decorated with an armillary sphere, a symbol of discovery and the kings personal emblem. King John III (r. ) owned platesbearing the Portuguese royal arms and a circular medallion formed by a crown of thorns and the insignia of the Jesuits. Sebastian, Manuels ill-fated grandson, had adish with his heraldic crest encircled by four Buddhist-style lions chasing a ball.13

In commissioning his pilgrim asks, then, Philip II acted as much like a con- ventional Portuguese sovereign as an avid art collector. Philip III (r. ),who shared his fathers enthusiasm for porcelain, went to Portugal in for hisbelatedcoronationas king of that nationavisitwith unhappyconsequences sincehe died in a few years from an illness contracted there. Making his ceremonial en-trance into Lisbon, he paraded under the customary triumphal arches. The oneerected by the guild of potters depicted Portuguese carracks unloading Chineseporcelain in the citys harbor and other ships taking aboard Portuguese imitationsof the Chinese ware for export to European countries. An inscription boasted thatours also go to different regions of the world. Holding upa blue-and-white earth-enware vase labeled porcelains (porcelanas), an allegorical gure declared:

Here most gracious Majesty We offer you the pilgrim artMade in the Lusitanian KingdomWhich China sold us at such high prices!14

CHINESE PORCELAINAND CROSS-CULTURAL EXCHANGE

This book explores the cultural role of Chineseporcelain in world history. In repli-cating chinaware, the Lisbon potters unwittingly trailed far behind craftsmen inmany other cultures. For over a thousand years, porcelain was both the most uni- versally admired and the most widely imitatedproduct in the world. Fromthe timeof its creation in the seventh century, it played a central role in cultural exchange

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in Eurasia: it was a prime material vehicle for the assimilation and transmission of artistic symbols, themes, and designs across vast distances. Porcelain had a com-manding impact byvirtueof in uencingall ceramic traditions itencountered,from

Japan and Java to Egypt and England. In some cases, it displaced local traditionsaltogether, thereby reaching deeply into indigenous cultural life.Porcelain provides evidence for artistic, commercial, and technological interac-

tion between China and other regions of the world from the origins of the pottery to the beginning ofthemodernage at the closeoftheeighteenthcentury. Inthe four-teenth century, porcelain inspired a commercial enterprise unprecedented in rangeand volume in the premodern worldraw material (cobalt ore) shipped from Per-sia to China to make huge quantities of blue-and-white chinaware for Muslims inIndia, Egypt, Iraq, and Persia. From the sixteenth century, byway of the Philippinesand Acapulco, Spanish galleons delivered blue-and-white to Mexico City and Lima(Peru) whilearistocrats inEuropetook delivery ofcustom-made tableware fromCan-ton. Given its volumeand circulation by theeighteenth century, porcelain yields theearliest and most extensive physical evidence for sustained cultural encounter on aworldwide scale, perhaps even for emergence of the rst genuinely global culture.

Porcelain acted as a sensitive barometer of human affairs, more than any othercommodity. It registered the impactof artistic conventions, international trade, in-dustrial development, political turmoil,elite expenditure, ceremonial rites, andcul-tural contact. It therefore is central to a wide range of topics:commercial exchange,domestic economy, consumption patterns, interior design, architecture, ornamen-tal motifs, fashion styles, dining etiquette, foodways, transportation networks, po-litical propaganda, manufacturing technology, product innovation, scienti c re-search, gender relations, religious beliefs, and social values.

Naturally, otherarticlesoftradealsotouchonsome ofthese topics. Inrecentyears,aspectsofworldhistoryhavebeenexaminedfromthepointofviewofsalt,tea,choco-late, coffee, silver, tobacco, opium, sugar, owers, wine, cod sh, corn, rhubarb, coal,clay, potatoes, spices, rearms, glass, and silk. All the products examined in these

works are shaped by human intervention, and indeed most are impossible withoutit.Contemporary anthropologyteaches that none areculturallyneutral; they all carry a valence, a certain meaning and context for everyone who uses the given item.

Some things that people consume, however, carry a more powerful charge thanothers. As products of nature, even though processed and altered by humans, coal,corn, and cod can say only so much. As crafted objects, entirely stuff of human invention, silk fabric, glass, silverwares, and ceramics perform at higher levels of cul-turalabstraction and metaphor, closertosculptureand painting than tosalt and sugar.They function as acts of imagination, expressions of tradition, assertions of com-munal identity, demonstrations ofsocialcohesion, vehicles ofprestigemanagement,objecti cations of self, and embodiments of social value. Nor is there a formal or-der to these various aspects, for the same object may represent a range of meanings

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as well as change those meanings over time. Human artifacts mediate between na-ture and culture, appetiteandre ection, disorderand intentionality, exploitation andinnovation, the ephemeral and the enduring, the raw and the cooked. With their

iconographic message about the vanity of worldly possessions forgotten by all butarthistorians,seventeenth-centuryDutchstill lifes continue toenthrallmodern view-ers in part because the works powerfully exemplify the same tensions, with naturalthingslobsters, tulips, nautilus shells, peeled lemons, oysters, ruddy hams, a braceof gamedisplayed alongside manufactured objects, such as pewter plates, Vene-tian crystal goblets, French silverware, crimson Turkish carpets, Japanese lacquer-ware, folds of damask, and blue-and-white porcelain bowls. (See gure .)

Ceramic vessels, however, have an exceptional status even within the category of made things. Pots are shaped by the pressure of hands on wet clay, making ce-ramics the most physically intimate of the arts, virtually impossible to abstract asa form from the earthy matter employed and the functional artifact created. Al-though classed as a decorative art, pottery has attributes that make it distinct from jewelry, gems, carpets,wallpaper, fabric, marble,bookbinding,cloisonn,silverware,and furniture. Since the eighteenth century, pottery (usually porcelain) has beenput on a pedestal to be admired, yet it resists that lofty isolation by virtueof its util-ity in cooking, eating, storing, and, until recently, excreting. Bowls, jars, and vasesin museums have a forlorn, derelict quality: vacant and untouchable, they are sev-ered from the everyday uses for which potters fashioned them.

Signi cantly, all cultures project an anthropomorphic image onto standing ce-ramics,seeingthemsymbolicallyasthree-dimensionalanaloguesforthehumanbody.And since women use pottery as a receptacle within domestic settings, the bodily re ection generally is feminine, predictably with erotic overtones: shaped in curves,thepot ischaracterized aspossessing a foot (or bottom), belly, arms, shoulders, neck,mouth, and lip.15 Soon after reaching the Philippines, Legazpi reported that he hadcaptured two Chinese junks that carried some ne porcelain jars, which they callsinoratas.16This gurative dimension sets ceramics apart from all other commodi-

ties. Indeed, somecultures, especially in easternand southernAfrica, where womenare the chief potters, identify metaphorical links between pots, kilns, and females,because all are involved in irreversible, heat-mediated transformations: pots warm-ing food, kilns ring pots, and the wombnurturing the embryo.17Porcelaineven ex-tends the sexual correspondence with the female inasmuch as its satiny surface hasevoked comparison, in all cultures, with the complexion of a beautiful woman.

THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE

OF CHINESE PORCELAINAsanexamination ofcross-cultural interactioninworldhistory, this book considershow various societies integrated Chinese porcelain into their art, religion, politics,

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and economy. It also looksathow thecommodityre ects important events inworldhistory. But even though porcelain has its intrinsic fascinations, making it a sourceof endless appeal and affection to collectors and connoisseurs, it was not itself cen-

tral to historical action. A couple of late-sixteenth-century invasions of Korea by Japan are called the Potters Wars, but no war was ever fought by potters or overpottery, and although King Frederick William I of Prussia (r. ) marshaledwhat contemporaries termed the Porcelain Regiment, the ceramic never played arole in war except as incidental, if prized, plunder. Massive imports of chinaware tothe West after resulted in development of a European version of porcelain by the early eighteenth century; but the Chinese vessels just hurried along an innova-tion that unquestionably would have taken place anyway within a few generations.

Excluding the likely effect of porcelain on reducing death from disease andthereby stimulating population increase, little in history would have been differentif the ceramic had never been created. China did without it until the seventh cen-tury, Europe until the sixteenth, and common earthenware serves most purposesin many countries today. Usually referring to porcelain generically (and epony-mously) as china, people in industrial societies overwhelmingly prefer it for theirtableware, and scientists annually turn out a mountain of highly technical publi-cations on its nature and uses. Porcelain is employed in numerous important ways,including in guided missiles, space shuttles, jet turbines, internal combustion en-gines, laser technology, body armor, dental surgery, and the bathroomit remainsan unsurpassed material for the sink, tub, and toiletbut these considerations gobeyond the chronological scope of this book.18

In addition, while porcelain was a product in international commerce from theseventh century, itwas bynomeans themost outstanding inquantity and in uence.Merchants traded textiles, especially silk and cotton, in greater amounts, a consid-eration thatmade fabrics the chief material carrier of culturalmessages in the formof designs, motifs, and colors. According to Matteo Ricci ( ), the greatpioneer of the Jesuit mission to China, There is no other staple of commerce with

which the Portuguese prefer to lade their ships than Chinese silk, which they carry toJapanandIndia,whereit ndsareadymarket.19HealsonotesthatSpanishmer-chants in the Philippines transshipped huge quantities of silk to the Americas andother parts of the world.

At all times, chinaware trailed behind spices in trade between East and West,and in the eighteenth century, Chinese tea also exceeded it in importance. Porce-lain, however, played an exceptional role in cultural exchange between China andthe distant reaches of Eurasia, one that other commodities intrinsically could notperform. Spices not only came from various parts of Asia, they naturally were in-tended for immediate use and consumption, and although pepper, nutmeg, cloves,and cinnamon were seen as possessing pharmacological and cultural signi cance,these meanings were imposed bytheir consumers, not intrinsic to themerchandise.

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Silk was regarded as indispensable for elite apparel and for employment in reli-gious ritual in Roman and Byzantine Christianity, but China lost its silk monopoly by the sixth century, when other countries obtained the technology of sericulture.

Silk exported from China also was often plain and in the form of yarn, and whileChinese silks with embroidered designs conveyed cultural messages about China,craftsmen in Southwest Asia and Europe frequently unwove the fabric and recy-cled the thread. Moreover, like all textiles, silk deteriorated rapidly if not kept intombs, shrines, or reliquaries. Glass vessels also had a short life span inasmuch asthey were easily broken. And because glass is made from a mixture of sand (whichprovides silica), the vessels could be melted at a relatively low temperature and re-fashioned in other shapes and colors. Artisans made silverwares in all places thewhite metal could be acquired, and merchants traded them internationally;but thehigh value of silver meant the vessels regularly went into the melting pot to be re-cycled for ready cash or into more fashionable utensils.20 Whereas precious plateand glass perishes, porcelain lives on. Easy to break yet hard to destroy, it retainsits color and decoration with perfection, even after centuries at the bottom of thesea.21It invariably conveyed cultural meaning in its shapes and decoration, thoughoften this was confusedly, if creatively, apprehended by foreign patrons. The ex-ceptional longevity of porcelain (and pottery in general) results in the curious cir-cumstance that much of the history of metalwork forms can be reconstructed only by looking at their relatively inexpensive ceramic replications.

In contrast to other commodities, porcelain remained a Chinese monopoly un-til just three centuries ago. Koreans made it from the ninth century and Japanesefrom the early seventeenth; yet this was done under Chinese tutelage, wholly de-pendent onmorethan two millenniaofChinese craft expertiseand technology. TheChinese (orSino-centered) monopolytruly wasbrokenonly in theearlyeighteenthcenturywhen, stimulatedby imports ofChineseandJapaneseporcelain, researchersat Meissen in Germany created a version of the ceramic, an achievement soon du-plicated by Svres in France and by many other European pottery manufactories.

Another distinctive characteristicof Chineseporcelain was that it was exportedin nished form and, unlike glass, could not be recycled, though the Dutch some-times added decoration to pieces in the seventeenth century. In the absence of recycling, artisans in Japan, Iraq, Turkey, Holland, England, and France repairedbroken porcelains withwire andmetal clamps.Aneighteenth-century Parisianman-about-townrecordedthat craftsmen from Normandymade a livingassellers ofrab-bit skins andmenders ofbroken china-ware.22A Londonadvertisinghandbill fromaround broadcast theservices ofEdmund MorrisChina-Rivetter, at the ChinaJarr, in Grays Inn. . . . Mends all sorts of China Wares with a Peculiar Art . . . so asa Rivetted Piece of China will do as much Service as when New.23

Various peoples found porcelain so compelling and even magical that fragmentsof shattered vessels were pulverized for medicine, framed for decorative hangings,

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handed out in religious ritual, used as auspicious gambling counters, and plasteredinto the walls of towers, shrines, churches, and mosques. Nowand again, it also haditsusesinwar.Chinesesoldiersinthethirteenthcenturyloadedbamboo amethrow-

ers with porcelain shards and metal chips. An enemy of William Kidd (ca. ), the British sea captain who turned to piracy, had his men stuff broken chi-naware dishes into a cannon and re them to shred the sails of his opponents.24 In Annus Mirabilis, John Dryden ( ) makes sport with this notion in de-scribing the English victory over the Dutch in the battle of Lowestoft off theSuffolk coast, anencounter inwhich the Dutch lost seventeenships, including a few that had been employed in trade with the Moluccas (the Spice Islands) and China:

Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a Ball,

And now their Odours armdagainst them ie:Some preciously by shatterd Porclain fall,And some by Aromatick splintersdie.25

Porcelainalso stands out fromother commodities inasmuch as ithad a uniquely ecumenical impact. Spices and silk went on a one-way journey, from east to west,at the end ofwhich peopleconsumedthe spicesand the silk frayed,faded,and nally vanished. Porcelain, however, not only endured but also played a central role in re-ciprocal cultural in uence. Chinese artistic motifs and designs taken from porce-lain were embraced by distant societies, after which, reshuf ed, reinterpreted, andfrequently misconstrued, they were sent back from where they came as decorationon merchandise such as cotton cloth, carpets, and silverwares. In like fashion, Chi-nese potters often adapted alien designs for their products, which merchants thenexported to the very foreign realms where the designs had originated generationsbefore. Thus a Chinese-in uenced version of exotic decoration would be imitatedby craftsmen half a world away, not suspecting that they were heirs of the cultural

tradition that had rst inspired that which they currently were emulating. In con-nection with other media, chie y textiles, metal vessels, and architectural adorn-ment, porcelain had a central part in a sometimes dizzying loop of cultural associ-ation and amalgamation.

The cultural impact ofporcelain providesan illuminating but unexplored themein the writing of world history. Inasmuch as broken pottery usually ends upburiedin strati ed deposits in the ground, it has been an indispensable source of informa-tion for archaeologists since the late seventeenth century. Historical study of ma-terial culture, commodities, and consumption, however, began only in recent de-cades.26Inparticular, it isnotsurprising that historians havedisregardedporcelain.Although there is an enormous literature on the subject, it appears in publicationsrarely consulted by them, such as exhibition catalogues, auction house magazines,

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antique monthlies, museum booklets, specialized monographs, art journals, pot-tery periodicals, and archaeology bulletins. In the study of history, porcelain hasbeen given no more respect than museum visitors habitually accord it as they bus-

tlepast cabinetsofplatters and pots tocontemplate well-known(and comparatively comprehensible) paintings and statues.Despite the signi cance of porcelain in long-distance commerce for centuries,

economic historians have shown scant interest in it. For their part, most writers onthe subject, typically a cionados, connoisseurs, collectors, and museum curators,concentrate on the aesthetic qualities of the vessels rather than on their economicrami cations. Thus while there has been no attempt to quantify and chart the mas-sive Chinese export trade in ceramics, there is a surfeit of antiquarian research devoted to identifying eighteenth-century Britisharmorial bearings on chinaware. Of course, experts on porcelain commonly approach their subject from more signi -cant perspectives:design motifs, pottery forms, speci c vessels, kilncomplexes, ar-chaeological nds, and notable collections. But though valuable and interesting initsownright, such workseldomaddresses largerhistorical considerations,economicones in particular.

Exceptional and long-standing barriers segregate the study of art from that of economics. In the most basic waysthemes investigated, sources examined, train-ingrequired,practices followed, questions askedarthistoriansandeconomichis-toriansobviously work quitedifferently. Porcelain, however, is most revealing whentreated as a cultural cynosure, a nexus where art and commerce converge, drawntogether by an artifact that in some measure incarnates and articulates the beliefs,customs, and mentalities of those who make, purchase, and esteem it. Positionedat the intersection of everyday life, commerce, and art, porcelain vessels were oftensimultaneouslyfunctional wares, pro table merchandise,and treasuredpossessions.Linked to social behavior, long-distance trade, and elite taste, porcelain affords adistinctive standpoint fromwhich toview world history, casting lightonmanytop-ics other than itself.

Porcelain isemployedhereasa sortoforganizingprinciple, a way toexamine thetangled interactions that make up human history. This book adopts theperspectiveexpressed by Wallace Stevens in Anecdote of a Jar, in which (as in a Dutch still life)thecraftedobject imposes formand order on the unruly profusion ofnatural things:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,And round it was, upon a hill.It made the slovenly wildernessSurround that hill.The wilderness rose up to it,And sprawled around, no longer wild.The jar was round upon the groundAnd tall and of a port in air.

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It took dominion everywhere.The jar was gray and bare.It did not give of bird or bush,Like nothing else in Tennessee.27

THE FALL OF CHINA AND THE RISE OF THE WEST

In a manner of speaking, this study is concerned more with the wilderness thanwith the jar: that is, it focuses on what porcelain reveals about cultures around theworld, not on the commodity itself. It emphatically does not provide a history of Chinese porcelain, still less a history of ceramics. Accordingly, technical materialregarding clays, glazes, and kilns is kept to a minimum. The presentation followsthe admirable example set by Cipriano Piccolpasso (ca. ), who explains inThe Three Books of the Potters Art, an introduction to Italian pottery manufacture,thathis worksteersclear ofmuch specialized detail so asnot toperplex other mensthoughts with what is not needful.28

Although the subject matter spans more than a millennium of history, most at-tention in this book is devoted to the early modern period, to . All chap-ters draw material from those years, which have been more thoroughly investigatedbystudents ofporcelain than haveearlier centuries. Furthermore, a study of thecul-tural in uence of Chinese porcelain in world history necessarily highlights devel-opments inearly modern times.Fromthe origins ofcivilization around . . .to thevoyagesofChristopher Columbus ( )and daGama,themostwide-ranging, long-term cultural interaction took place across the super-continentformed by the isthmus linking Eurasia and Africa. That landmass effectively con-stituted an ecumenefrom Greek oikoumen, the inhabited quarter of theworlda series of civilizations or extensive regional societies in communication,however shaky and sporadic, between the Atlantic and Paci c.29

Some travelers, most famouslyMarco Polo ( ) andIbn Battuta (

), crossed much of that expanse. Polo could make his journey from Venice toChina because Mongol conquerors provided security on the so-called Silk Road,a network of trails and oases linking West and East Asia. Ibn Battuta journeyedfrom Morocco to Canton, wending his way along a trading network (or diaspora)of Muslim merchants on the sea lanes connecting Southwest Asia and the IndianOcean to the coast of southern China. Counting his later trip to West Africa, hetraveled some , kilometers in twenty-nine years, passing through much of the ecumene.

Discovery of the New World and the Cape Route to India, however, gave riseto an ecumene on a global scale, with peoples everywhere caught up in ever-increasingcommercial, technological, andintellectual exchange.A result of that ec-umenical transitionwas the availabilityofAsian products inEurope and the Amer-

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icas. For the rst time, porcelain became a truly worldwide commodity. What may be called the globalization of material culture began in the era of Columbus andda Gama, with chinaware motifs, colors, and shapes its earliest and most wide-

ranging manifestation. The ewer of Manuel I and the pilgrim ask of Philip II aretting illustrations of this.Re ecting theacknowledgedsuperiority of Chinese manufactured goods, glob-

alization of material culture initially came to pass under Chinese auspices. Colum-bus sailed the Ocean Sea with a letter from the Spanish crown recommending himto the grand khan of China and the kings of India, and in his copy of The Travelsof Marco Polo ( ), Columbus earmarked the passage in which the Venetianpromised that an incalculable amount of trade awaited Westerners in the land of Cathay.30Whenthe second Portuguese eetunder Pedrolvares Cabral (ca.

) returned from the Indian Ocean to Lisbon in , Manuel I reported to afellow monarch that porcelains, musk, amber, and aloes wood could be acquiredfrom a land to the east of India known as Malchina (from Sanskrit Mahacina,Great China).31

Chinahad theworlds mostadvancedeconomythroughoutmuchofhistory, providing goods to an enormous domestic market, as well as to Korea, Japan, South-east Asia, and countries on the Indian Ocean.32 Europeans gained direct access toAsian markets after , and along with Indian cottons and Asian spices, it wasChinese merchandisetea, silk fabric, lacquer furniture, hand-painted wall hang-ings, andporcelainsthat Westerners most desired. Fromtheseventeenth century,desperate to halt the ow of silver to Asia to pay for the goods, European rulerspromoted efforts to replicate chinaware and other manufactured items.

From , however, globalization of material culture proceeded swiftly underWesternrather than Chinese sponsorship.Theindustrial revolutionhadbeen gain-ing steam for several decades before the turn of the century, with pottery manu-facturers among the most important pacesetters in devising new manufacturingtechniques and sketching the outlines of factory organization. The rst global con-

sequence of theindustrial revolution appeared with theprecipitouscollapse ofChi-nese porcelain in international markets in the late eighteenth century as a result of competition from British ceramics, mainly those produced by Josiah Wedgwood( ), the famous pottery baron.

Yet while the fall of Chinese porcelain clearly is noteworthy in the contexts of the history of ceramics, an expansive chronicle of material culture, and the pre-liminary global impact of the industrial revolution, its greatest value for an exam-ination of world history lies in it mirroring a transformation of the greatest mag-nitude. That changeis clari edbyplacing itwithin a lengthy perspective. Byaroundtheyear , long-distancecommercialexchange hadintegratedtheecumene intowhat contemporary historians call a world system, a series of interacting, overlap-ping economies. A complex trading network of silver and gold bullion, as well as

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spices, precious stones, metals, textiles, and pottery, connected much of Eurasia.More than any other region, China functioned as the fulcrum of the world system,the motor that made it run.33

The overseas reach of the huge Chineseeconomy intensi ed ancient patterns of trade and cultivation throughout Southeast Asia and the countries of the IndianOcean. The distant ripples of its effect could be felt even in Europe as the marketfor Asian products expanded in the Mediterranean and north of the Alps. Becauseof its role as a powerhouse from the turn of the rst millennium, China had someeconomic justi cation for its ancient self-designation in cultural terms as theMid-dle Kingdom (zhongguo), the axis of the world, with lesser states on its periphery and regrettably barbarianpeoples, such as Africans andEuropeans, remote bene -ciaries of its blessings.

China lost that dominance and self-assurance soon after , however, as thecenter of gravity of the world system shifted toward the countries of northwesternEurope. In The Wealth of Nations ( ), Adam Smith ( ) famously stateda crucial precondition for that realignment: The discovery of America, and thatof a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest andmost important events recorded in thehistory of mankind.34The widespread pos-sessions of Philip II represented the most remarkable early manifestation of Eu-ropes new, elevatedposition around theworld.Warningof themenace Philips em-pire posed to England, William Camden ( ) said it extended so far thatthekingmight trulysay,Solmihisemper lucet:thesunnealways shineth upon me.35But the threat receded as the Spanish-Portuguese empire fractured at the seams inthe seventeenth century. Still, as Baron de Montesquieu ( ) suggested inThe Spirit of the Laws( ), the Iberian collapsedid not marka retreat of the Westfromthe globalarena:Europe carries onthe commerceand navigationof the otherthree parts of the world, just as France, England, and Holland carry on nearly allthe navigation and commerce of Europe.36

Building on their economic dominance, thosenations wenton to establish their

ownoverseasdominions,uponwhichthesunindeeddidnotsetuntilthelatetwen-tieth century. From having been for centuries no more than a marginal participantamong the associated territories of Eurasia, the West began seizing center stage inthe early modern period, pioneering global maritime routes, setting up overseastrading posts, planting European-style societies in the Americas, colonizing mostof Asia, fashioning new political and economic institutions, and ultimately emerg-ing as the driving force of modernity.37

This revolutionary shift of the world system from East to West was paralleled inthe international career of Chineseporcelain, the fortunes of which moved in con-certwith thoseofChinaitself.European zeal for importingporcelain after daGamas voyage suggests the awe and envy with which Westerners regarded China from thetime they read Marco Polos account of the Middle Kingdom. European dedication

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to replicating porcelain from the seventeenth century points to Western determi-nation to escape economic dependence on China and mount a challenge to its in-dustrial might. Finally, thecommercial success Europeans achieved with their own

pottery inoustingchinawarefrominternationalmarkets at theend of theeighteenthcentury foreshadowed Western international dominance in the modern world. Inthe widestperspective, then, the fall ofChineseporcelain by closely tracks theepochal decline of China in world affairs and the corresponding rise of the West toprimacy within the global ecumene.

Of course, at least on some important counts, that supremacy is a thing of thepast. Since the end of World War II, Western nations have been forced to give uptheir colonial possessions, and they have lost the power to dictate military and po-litical affairs across the board. There are also signs that China will contest the Westfor economicdominancein themodern-day, rapidlyshifting worldsystem, thereby perhaps resurrecting the standing it held through much of history. Whether Eastor West (orneither) emerges triumphant, however, porcelainwill remain above thebattle: if it no longer attracts the wonder and high regard bestowed on it for ages,that is a result of the ceramic having become irrevocably a possession of the world,manufactured and used virtually everywhere.

YetwhileChina has longsince lost its monopoly, Jingdezhen, the town thatonceproduced nearly all the worlds porcelain, continues to turn out more than mil-lion pieces annually, most of it blandly interchangeable with that manufactured inItaly, Denmark, Chile, and Malaysia. Still, mindful of its spectacular past and itswilling contemporary customers, Jingdezhen makes a handsome pro t by repro-ducingexactlysomeofthedazzlingporcelainsthatcaptivatedtheworldforsomany centuries.

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The Porcelain City Jingdezhen in the Eighteenth Century

In the opening years of the eighteenth century, Franois-Xavier Dentrecolles es-tablished a church in Jingdezhen, the great porcelain center on the Chang Riverin the province of Jiangxi, southeastern China. A recruit for the French missionof the Jesuits, he was thirty- ve years old when he arrived in Canton in onboard the Amphitrite, a ship purchased by the Compagnie des Indes orientales(French East India Company), a state-sponsored syndicate, from Louis XIV (r.

).1Dentrecolleswas not themosteminent orcontroversialof theapproximately fty

Jesuits who served with him over the next four decades, but he had a passion forthe curious and unusual, along with a gift for sifting and marshaling information.Afterworkingin Jingdezhen for morethan two decades,hepresided over theFrenchmissionary residence in Beijing until , during which he translated and com-

mented on Chinese accounts of medicine, currency, and government administra-tion. He also sent reports home on the raising of silkworms, the crafting of arti -cial owers in silk and paper, the manufacture of synthetic pearls, methods of smallpox inoculation, and the cultivation of tea, ginseng, and bamboo. This repre-sented the sort of engagement with indigenous culture that the Society of Jesus ex-pected of its learned priests. A fellow Jesuit declared in a funeral eulogy for Dentre-colles in Beijing in that everyone had a high opinion of his wisdom.2 Hisassignment to Jingdezhen suggests that Dentrecolless superiors recognized his tal-ent for inquiry and analysis from the start. Signi cant information was expectedfrom the man posted there.

In and Dentrecolleswrote lengthy lettersonthemanufactureofporce-lain to Louis-Franois Orry, treasurer of Jesuit missions to China and India. They


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parts ofChina, to ladewith China Earthenware, whereof great store is sold in this Vil-lage. Quite through the middle of this rich Village runs a broad Street, full of shopson both sides, where all manner of Commodities are sold; but the chiefest Trade is inPurceline, or China dishes, which is to be had there in great abundance.4

The shopkeepers on Porcelain Street (as Dentrecolles calls it) paid rents and had topurchase government licenses, but a ea market on a small island in the river wel-comed anyone who had odds and ends to sell. Some dealers, known as island bas-ket carriers, collected wares with blotches and hairline cracks from the kilns andsold them piecemeal at the market, concealing defects with plaster, wheat gluten,andmulberry juice. Customerseuphemistically called these sorry items goods thathave crossed the river.5

Dentrecolles marvels atmen striding through thenarrowstreets carrying plankstopped with porcelains on their shoulders, never losing their balance amid swarm-ing crowds. In fact, pedestrians gave them a wide berth as anyone who bumpedinto them and shattered the porcelains had to pay for the damagea costly lessonthat pro ts came rst in Jingdezhen. Dentrecollesdescribes chainsof workershaul-ing clay to vast storehouses surrounded bywalls, where one sees, in row uponrow,a great number of jars of earth. He expresses astonishment that laborers unload-ingtheswelteringkilnsputsaltintheirteainordertodrinkalotwithoutbecomingill. Artisans going to work made hasty sacri ce at shrines dedicated to Tung, tute-lary god of re and porcelain. Hucksters peddled adulterated clay and phony glazeto would-be potters, landless villagers hoping to make their fortunes in the boom-ing city. Furnaces operated around the clock, and a large oating population an-chored in boats along the riverbank, providing lodging, delivering foodstuffs, andloading porcelains. A visiting imperial magistrate complained, The noise of tensof thousands of pestles thundering on the ground and the heavens alight with theglare from the res kept me awake all night.6 In his description of the approach toJingdezhen at night, Dentrecolles evokes a moonlit vision of the city as swept by

con agration, silhouetted by billows of smoke and ame, the surrounding moun-tains forming the walls of a single gigantic furnace, its countless re-eyes (ventholes) tended by shadowy laborers.

Jingdezhen is on the eastern bank of the Chang River, which ows from themountains to the north that separate northeastern Jiangxi province from neigh-boring Anhui. The city stands at the point where the river exits rocky gorges andloses its swiftness, broadening into a shallow, curving basin ve kilometers long.Dozensofstreams owing into thevalley powered undershotwaterwheelsandirontrip-hammers that crushed rock tobe usedfor makingpottery. Hong Yanzu (

), anof cialstationed in Jiangxiprovince, portrayed the scene ina poem:Thebones of the mountain in the end turn to powder,/On the outskirts, many pestles

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pound the earth, /On the river, half the boats transport mud.7 Mills produced thebest material in the drizzling spring, when the force of water on the pestles was ro-bust and regular, making the pulverized earth ne and dense.

Dentrecolles explains that in of cial imperial nomenclature, Jingdezhen didnotrank as a city because it had no encircling wall, perhaps because one could notthen enlarge and extend it as one wishes. Its designation in the early Song periodas a market town (zhen) meant that it relied on trade and therefore could expandascommercialneedsdictated,perpetually rebuilding and enlarging after oods andblazes. According to Dentrecolles, a re once wiped out eight hundred porcelainshops, yet the owners made such handsome pro t from rents that they immedi-ately employed scores of masons and carpenters for reconstruction.

Hemmed in by mountains, Jingdezhen looked across the river to tombs built by merchants and shopkeepers on low hills made up largely of porcelain shardsdumpedthere over the centuries. Dentrecolles records that bodies of the poor werethrown into a place known as the pit to in nity, the grave for all the world, at thefoot of a hill aunting the sepulchers of the rich. It distressed him to contemplatethe generations of unfortunates ung into that abyss, the esh on their bodies con-sumed byquicklime. Every winter, Buddhistmonksgathered and burned thebonesto make room for yet more, an especially grueling task during frequent periods of plague. Streaming past the graveyard and town, the Chang leaves the valley towardthe southwest, where itoncemoreplunges intogorgesonits journey toLake Boyang,the gateway by which the porcelains of Jingdezhen reached the wider world.

Renowned in China as the Town of Year-Round Thunder and Lightning,Jingdezhen was the largest industrial complex in the world when Dentrecolles ar-rived.8 Its inhabitants depended for their livelihood on the three thousand kilnsscattered through the city and cluttering the surrounding slopes; craftsmen alsoworked in numerous kilns nearby, especially in the village of Hutian, four kilo-meters southeast of Jingdezhen.As a Qingof cial remarked, Thesoil can bepoorand local customs unhealthy, and when the people did not have the means to pro-

vide for themselves, they molded the soil into vessels for eating and drinking toprovide for themselves.9 A sixteenth-century observer noted that in northernJiangxi province, the wealthy become merchants and the clever people becomeartisans, for there is not enough food to feed so many people where the moun-tains are dense and the elds cramped.10 Tang Ying ( ), an imperialscholar-of cial associated with Jingdezhen for almost three decades from his rstappointment there in 8, wrote that the re stands in the samerelation to themas ne weather and rain to others, and they depend on porcelain as others do onmillet and corn. Or as a poet put it centuries earlier: Ten thousand chimneyssmoke to ll ten thousand mouths.11

Dentrecolles aspired both to win converts among the artisans and to discovertheir secrets of porcelain, a commodity desired and imitated everywhere, not least

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in the France of Louis XIV. In the workshops of the potters, the Jesuit preachedHim who made the rst man out of clay and from whose hands we depart to be-come vessels of splendor or of shame. Despite the costly sea green antiques and

gilded vasesfor sale onPorcelainStreet, hemost treasured a gift froma parishioner,a crude plate found in the rubbish of a shop and decorated with the Virgin and St.John anking the Cross, a relic he valued more highly than the nest porcelainmade a thousand years ago. One of his converts told him that similar ceramic souvenirs had been smuggled into Japan in cases of ordinary wares until the enemiesof religion halted the traf c shortly before Christianity came to Jingdezhen.

SENDING PORCELAIN TO ALL PARTS OF THE WORLD

Dentrecolles notes that some ofhis parishioners kneaded clay for a living: But thiswork is very grueling, and those Christians who are employed in it have dif culty attending church; they receive permission only if theycan get a substitute, for whenthis labor is stopped, all the other workers are held up. Kneading clay was just oneof themanycoordinated stepsneededfor themanufacture ofporcelain. Jingdezhenused methods of mass production centuries before the advent of machine powerandtheassemblyline.12Since,asDentrecollesproclaims, Jingdezhenalonehas thehonor of sending porcelain to all parts of the world, such techniques were essen-tial. The connection would not have surprisedAdam Smith.Familiar with Chineseporcelain from massed displays in the drawing rooms of Edinburgh and Paris, hearticulated the economic principle that governs the production of well-traveledcommodities. In the famous third chapter of The Wealth of Nations, he explainsthat division of labor in production increases as the market for merchandise ex-pands.13 Coordinated effort, specialized skills, and standardized replication of wares were the only way for Jingdezhen to ll short-term orders for huge amountsof porcelain from seagoing merchants in Canton and other ports.

Francesco Carletti (ca. ), a Florentine merchant, expressed astonish-

ment at the porcelain he saw in Macao around : The quantity of it is so greatthat whole eets, let alone single ships, could be laden with it.14 Even before thePortuguese arrived in China in the early sixteenth century, they routinely trans-ported as many as , porcelains from India in a single carrack; cargoes of

, became common after they established direct trade with China.15 Ships of the Vereenigte Oost-Indische Compagnie (United East India Company), or VOC,of the United Provinces of the Netherlands carriedmorethan , ceramics fromChina every yearbetween and , percent ofwhich went toEurope.TheDutch also keptsome , porcelains instockata transferdepotatAnpingGangon the coast of Taiwan (Formosa), just as the English East India Company (EIC)kept large stores in its London warehouse. A VOC vessel shipped , ceram-ics in , and an English one took away forty tons (or some , pieces) ten

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years later. In four ships of the EIC loaded , pieces each. The sales cat-alogue of a cargo reveals that a Swedish ship brought back precisely , porce-lains in . Another Swedish vessel, theGtheborg,transported , Chinese

ceramics in , as well as silk, tea, rattan, mother-of-pearl, and spices; but it fa-mously sank within sight of its home port of Gothenburg after a round-trip jour-neyofovertwoyearsand , kilometers.Inthe sailingseason,theVOC,the EIC, and other European East Indies companies exported a total of tons(more than , , pieces) of porcelain from Canton on twenty-two vessels.

It all added up to at least million pieces of chinaware arriving on Europeandocks in thethreecenturies after thePortuguesereachedChina.Huge amounts alsowere shipped throughout East Asia and to Southwest Asia, bringing the export of porcelains during those centuries to an average of some three million pieces every year. Most came from Jingdezhen, although hundreds of kilns on the coast of thesouthern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian also produced substantial quantitiesof less highly regarded chinaware for Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. A lateMingwriter belittled those kilns for making porcelain buddhas and delicate gurines,things of no great practical value.16 Dentrecolles points out that even foreignersdidnotmistaketheceramicsfor Jingdezhenporcelains,for coastal wares are snow-white, without luster, and never decorated with colors. (See figure 3.)

Even with millions of pieces being exported, however, porcelain was never themainChineseexport. Inthe early eighteenthcentury, itgenerallyran a distant thirdbehind silk and tea destined for western Asia, with fans, lacquerware furniture,quicksilver, vermilion(orcinnabar), sugar, dye, crudezinc,camphor, driedrhubarb(a medicinal drug), copper, and gold as supplementary exports. In the EICsCourt of Directors in London, headquartered in Leadenhall Street, instructed thecaptain of the Fleet Frigate to acquire the very best sorts of China Goods, includ-ing fabrics of silk, damask, and velvet (as much differing as possible from EnglishPatterns), and tea of the very best sort and to ll all space otherwise availablewith chinaware of the greatest variety of Colours and Paints.17 Yielding steady

pro ts of to percent, porcelain represented percent of the value ofall VOCshipments and percent of the value of all Asian exports of the EIC. In theVOCs Geldermalsen sank on its voyage from Canton to Batavia (Jakarta) carrying

, porcelains, including , dinner utensils, , teacups and saucers,teapots, , coffee cupsand saucers, beer tankards,and vomit pots

all of which amounted to percent of the cargos value. But along with goldbars, itwas the onlypartof the shipmenteventually toreach market: excavated fromthe bottom of the South China Sea in the s, the porcelains, still in excellentcondition, were auctioned in London for million.18

Mass production also was essential for large commissions from domestic en-trepreneurs and from the imperial court in what is now Beijing. The latter some-times called for table servicesand ritual vessels ina widevarietyofhues and shapes.

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A devotee of porcelain, the Xuande emperor (r. ), ordered more than, pieces in some years. The Wanli emperor (r. ) called for only , per year, a burden still great enough to cause disgruntlement among the

potters. In the early eighteenth century, on top of other orders, imperial of cialsannually sent a consignment of , bowls, dishes, and plates to the capital. Inaddition, the emperor often commissioned similar quantities as diplomatic gifts tokings and chiefs as part of the tributary trade with overseas polities that China re-garded as clients. The founder of the Ming dynasty, the Hongwuemperor (r.

), sent an envoy in to the Ryukyu Kingdom (modern Okinawa), southwestof Japan, with , porcelains for local potentates.19

Some three hundred kilns won designation as suppliers for the emperor, withprivate producers also drafted into service when Beijings demands outran the ca-pacity of the imperial furnaces. Eunuch agents of the Son of Heaven (Tianzi) su-pervised the kiln complex, which comprised over master craftsmen and some

workers serving two dozen departments. The people of northern Jiangxi paidhigh taxes to fund imperial costs for kiln construction, raw materials, labor, andshipping.Moreover, thestandards forimperial (orof cial) articleswere lofty, evenoppressive at times. Porcelains regarded by the eunuchs as unsuitable for the em-peror supposedly were smashed and buried so that nonimperial hands would notsully them; but the overseers actually sold hugeamounts clandestinely on the homemarket, despite severepenalties if foundout.Some connoisseurs,however, preferredtheoutputofprivate kilnsbecause itgenerallydisplayed greater invention and imag-ination. A Qing authority explained that potters working on of cial wares are un-willing to take risks, whereas those serving private kilns scribble freely trustingto their hands. Experienced brushes are given their heads. . . . [T]hey alone reachheights to which others cannot attain.20

As Dentrecolles reports, some items demanded by the court were so ne anddelicate thatpotters had toplace themoncottonwool since they could not behan-dled without breaking. Others proved too intricate or unwieldy to be molded and

red, such as thick-sided tanks, perhaps to be used as bathtubs, which certain pot-ters labored on for three years without success. The imperial kilns, however, repre-sented no more than a fraction of those in Jingdezhen, and they were the only onessubject entirely to government direction and, for all practical purposes, held cap-tive to a single customer. While artisans in of cial and private kilns, along with allother handicraft workers, had to join guilds that supervised conditions of employ-ment and livingquarters,most potters working in private operations effectively es-caped government supervision and control. Instead, they had to satisfy consumersby means of their own expertise and industry.

Far- ung and varied markets fostered an artisan mentality in Jingdezhen thatwas exceptionally open to innovation. Virtuosity and exibility were as essentialfor the prosperity of theporcelain cityasstandardization and massproduction. Such

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adaptability was unusual, for in peasant societies potters are notoriously conserva-tive craftsmen: they are close to their materials, committed to repetitive tasks, andconstrainedbylocalmores, andtheyservice isolated markets. Unlike farmers,whose

livelihood isat themercyof theweather, pottersdependontheir skill,on techniquesdeveloped by trial and error. Because poor potting and a bad ring could wipe outmonths of labor and destroy a household, potters usually are devoted to turningout the same sort of wares by time-honored methods.21

In contrast, Jingdezhens orientation to distant markets encouraged creative, re-sourceful enterprise. Change came from the outside world, forcing potters to look beyond their mountain fastness. The spread of Buddhism in China in the Sui andTangperiodsmeantnewceremonialparaphernalia wererequired;hence Jingdezhenand other pottery centers produced ceramic versions of reliquaries, alms bowls, oillamps,andstem-cups.ApopularforminChina(andlaterinSoutheastAsia)provedto be the kendi, a small Indian pouring jar (or jarlet) used for ritual ablution, witha bulbous body, nohandle, and a spout set at anangle to the shoulder.22Jingdezhenpotters also produced a range of unique products for the studies of Chinese literati(rujia),such as inkstones, water droppers, brushpots,wrist rests, paperweights, andchess sets. At least one kiln specialized in musical instruments, turning out utes,

ageolets, andminiaturecarillons with nine chimes. According toDentrecolles, ar-tisansdisplayednotable skill in their craftingof idiosyncratic items (ortoys), suchas tortoises that oat onwater and a cat whose headheld a lamp, the light ofwhichgleamed through its two eyes. They assured me, Dentrecolles reports, that inthe night the rats were terri ed by it. Obeying commands from a son of the em-peror, potters made a massive lantern in a single piece that could light up a wholeroom; but they botched an attempt to produce a fourteen-pipe organ that he alsodemanded. (See gure 3.)

Beyond exotic articles for the court and common wares for the domestic mar-ket, Jingdezhen produced works catering to the tastes and needs of consumersaround theworld: Edo(Tokyo), Manila, Batavia,Delhi, Isfahan,Cairo, Venice, Am-

sterdam, and Paris. In fact,Dentrecolles arrived in the porcelain city shortly beforethe VOC and other Western joint-stock companies opened of ces in Canton to fa-cilitate relaying commissions to kiln owners. After European orders for wigstands, picture frames, close-stool pans, shaving basins, colanders, hyacinth vases,bulb pots, walking-stickhandles, mustard jars, saltcellars, forkhandles, sauceboats,cha ngdishes, cheesecradles, and puddingmolds stretchedfurtherthepro ciency of theartisans.English traders ordered newly fashionable monteiths (glass chillers)in the late seventeenth centurybowls with semicircular cuts in the rim for prop-ping wine glasses resting on ice in the centerproviding wooden models alien tothe Chinese. The Dutch sent glass cruets, vessels with double spouts and a verticalpartition inside to separate oil and vinegar, to be copied. For less specialized items,potters substituted familiar objects: when Dutch merchants requested spittoons in

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, the order was lled by adapting the shape of an octagonal vase used for dis-playing a single lotus ower.

Dentrecolles claimsthat in lling a European commission twenty years later, the

workmen made some designs which were supposed to be impossible: urns four-teen centimeters tall, topped with pyramidal caps, each made in several pieces, yetmolded together so adroitly that joinings could not be detected. I was told, he re-lates, that eighty urns were made, but that only eight of them were successful, allthe others being ruined. The appearance ofWesterners in China led to productionof gurines of them, invariably un attering caricatures rather than realistic por-traits. According toLanPusPotteries of Jingdezhen,a late-eighteenth-centurycom-pilation of views on porcelain, traders in such eccentric pieces came mainly fromGuangdong province, where Europeans tended to cluster: They sell them to theforeign devils to ll their markets. The shapes are usually very strange. An early-eighteenth-century, gnomelike gureofa Dutchman,commissionedbyVOC mer-chants and christened Mr. Nobody (after a character in anEnglish play), doubledasa drinkingvessel.A porcelaincup fromthe sametimebears a depictionofDutchmerchants, big-nosed and oddly garbed, shopping for such souvenirs at a Cantonpottery stall.23

Beyond serving a wide and diverse market, the artisans of Jingdezhen were im-pelled toward novelty by their production of skeuomorphsobjects that imitatethe form or shape of one material in another.24 As the apocryphal book the Wis-dom of Solomon ( : ) declares, potters must compete with workers in gold andsilver and imitate workers in bronze. Everywhere they worked, potters providedan attractive, down-market substitute for vessels of precious metal and semi-precious gemstone. Furthermore, the pliability of clay allowed an adept potter tomold it to mimic commonplace materials, such as wood, horn, and leather, as wellas turnout fancifulsculptures inbakedclay, suchascray sh, lotus owers, and crab-apple blossoms. From the late Shang period (ca. . . .), pottery imitated rit-ualbronzevesselsused asceremonial utensils and funerarygoods.DuringtheTang,

potters in Jingdezhen and elsewhere in China time and again developed new skillsand designs by replicating vessels from models in jade and silver. From the Song,they also supplied the markets ofSouthwest Asia with ceramic versions ofartifacts,such as brasshand warmers, rock-crystal (quartz) ewers, ivory chessmen,androse-wood prayer screens.

Not surprisingly, Jingdezhen alsopro tedfrom makingimitationsof ancientce-ramics,especially those of theSong period.A talented potterandantiquarian, TangYing learned the art of making close copies of famous wares of the past, elegantceramics in a sea green hue that he would present to his patrons at the imperialcourt.25Without actually namingTang, Dentrecollesdescribes how the mandarinwho has honored me with his friendship would put porcelains into a fatty soup,after which they would be red a second time and then stowed in a foul sewer for

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at least a month. They emerged from this noxious treatment looking several cen-turiesold, and because they were thickly potted, they do not ring whenstruckandmake no humming noise when held close to the ear.

By the time Dentrecolles arrived in Jingdezhen, potters had broadened theirrepertoire to turn out porcelain facsimiles of Dutch pewter beer mugs, Venetiancrystal vases, and French silver loving cups. Zhu Yan, a former governor of Jiangxiprovince and the author of A Description of

1_ the pilgrim art

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