Porcelain: A Brief History

Anne Gerritsen (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies and Warwick University)

The Marco Polo jar

In the Treasury of St Mark in Venice is a small white ceramic jar. [1] It does not appear to be a brilliant white, and the pot is certainly not displayed to its best advantage. It is, however, one of the most significant objects in the global history of the commodity that forms the subject of this essay. This jar was made in the late thirteenth century, in a place where very few Europeans had ever ventured, at a time when no one in Europe was able to manufacture something so hard, so translucent, and so white. It was brought to Venice, or so the story goes, by none other than Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant who left Venice in 1271 and travelled the length of the Silk Road to reach the court of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. It was Marco Polo’s book Il Milione, known in English as The Description of the World or simply The Travels that first drew the attention of the Europeans to the beauty and value of Chinese porcelain. [2] (See the discussion in Chinese Porcelain: Sixteenth-Century Coloured Illustrations, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908, p. 17.) ‘For a Venetian groat you might buy three bowls of such beauty that nothing lovelier could be imagined’, Polo told his readers. He explained that it was made of a material that had to be ‘stacked in huge mounds and then left for thirty or forty years exposed to wind, rain, and sun’, so that ‘when a man makes a mound of this earth he does so for his children.’ [3] The length of time required to prepare the material, its hardness and its translucency, coupled with its beauty, all added to the mysterious attraction of porcelain. From the late thirteenth century onwards, Polo’s text had an ever-growing pan-European readership, which was introduced not only to porcelain, but to a wealth of entirely unknown places, materials and customs. By the time Europeans first encountered (descriptions of) porcelain, it already had a long and venerable history in its place of origin; so it is with the story of porcelain in China that this essay begins.

Chinese porcelain

Forming shapes from clay and firing these in an oven (or kiln) of some sort seems to be a part of all settled human civilisation, as is testified by archaeological finds all over the world. Variations in raw materials, designs and technologies create the distinct types and styles of pottery that allow us to differentiate separate cultures across time and space. The particular make-up of the raw materials found in northern China meant it could be fired at a high temperature, creating a material that was quite different from the ceramics produced anywhere else. We refer to this as porcelain on the basis that in the process of firing at high heat, the molecular structure of the clay changed, creating an extremely hard, impermeable, translucent material. [4] The fact that porcelain appeared in the potters’ kilns in northern China is the result, thus, of a combination of the ability to create and control kilns firing at very high temperatures and the geological conditions that had created a ‘kaolinized’ clay. [5] When rock, especially feldspathic rock, decomposes over millennia, it forms a kaolinized clay, which means it has both plasticity and the ability to withstand very high temperatures. Northern China was by no means the only place in the world that combined these two elements; as we will see below, Saxony in Germany, Limoges in France, and Cornwall in the UK also had kaolinized clays, but the development of porcelain in China precedes the discovery of the European equivalent by more than a millennium. By the time of the Tang dynasty (618-907), ceramics in a wide variety of shapes, designs, colours and qualities were produced for domestic use throughout the Chinese realm and for export to Inner Asia, Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia. [6] We know this, amongst other things, from a ninth-century shipwreck known as the Belitung shipwreck, laden with Tang-dynasty porcelains, found in what are now Indonesian waters. [7]