The story of porcelain
Chinese craftsmanship center of new Smithsonian exhibit
Monday, January 3, 2005 Posted: 11:57 AM EST (1657 GMT)
This 14th-century porcelain plate from China is part of an exhibit at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington.
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Long before there were countless items in stores labeled "Made in China," Americans adorned their colonial tables with porcelain dinnerware with the ornate blue-and-white designs of the Orient.
While China's trade has changed vastly in size and breadth over the centuries since, Americans' fondness for chinaware hasn't, as evidenced by new exhibits at two Smithsonian Institution museums that trace the history of Beijing's most famous exports.
It all started when the Empress of China, the first U.S. ship in the China trade, docked in New York in 1785 with 328,000 pounds of tea. The second item in its cargo was 128,260 pounds of porcelain. There were only 3,200 pounds of nankeen, a cheap cotton fabric then much used for men's trousers.
Now imports of Chinese clothes and textiles are the big worries of American businesses and workers. They fear losses of sales and jobs from cheaper Chinese products with the expiration of U.S. laws limiting imports of many items.
Porcelain now accounts for only a small portion of U.S. imports from China -- $81 million worth in 2003, a year when China sold the United States $124 billion more of its goods and services than it bought. But the value of China that Americans still buy has been climbing steadily since 1998.
The Smithsonian exhibits don't deal with today's problem, but with developments in trade and technology that go back a thousand years before the Empress of China set sail.
Though rulers of old China considered any goods from abroad to be inferior, Chinese merchants did a lively trade with the Middle East. Navigators from Persia -- as Iran used to be called -- and areas nearby reached China centuries before Columbus tried to get there by sailing west.
The Middle East explorers sailed around India, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia to southern China. What is now the Iraqi port of Basra on the Persian Gulf became a center for manufacture, shipment and trade in ceramics.
Some of the first recorded arrivals in Iraq of Chinese porcelain were sent to Harun al-Rashid, the caliph whom legend has placed at the heart of "The Arabian Nights."
"The city of Basra in Iraq was a flourishing port at the hub of a vital ceramics industry that made radically innovative and lasting contributions to the history of world ceramics," said the announcement of a show at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery called "Iraq and China: Ceramics, Trade and Innovation." It will be on view through April 24.
Until March 20, a collection of Chinese work from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, including many outstanding antique ceramics, will also be at the Sackler.
Early Chinese porcelain, though beautifully white, shiny and translucent, was not ornamented. The Iraqis didn't have the raw materials to imitate it exactly but embellished their own cream-colored clay vessels with designs in cobalt blue. The Chinese adopted the practice. By the time American imports from China began, the blue on white pattern had become a Chinese trademark much admired in later times and by today's collectors.
A single blue-and-white dish from the period of China's Ming dynasty sold in Hong Kong last April for the equivalent of $5.25 million.
Iraqi experts adorned their work with graceful Arabic writing, and borrowed colors from their glass industry. Copper and silver mixtures produced metallic "luster" effects. That technique spread to Muslim-ruled areas in Spain and then to Italy, where it became the basis of the multi-colored majolica ceramics. Its influence spread to ceramics made as far away as the Netherlands and Britain.
Work from China's Ming dynasty, which ended 350 years ago, can be seen until June 26 at the Freer Gallery in an exhibit called "Luxury and Luminosity." The Freer also has a show on Chinese ceramics that were done in black and white, some of them more than a millennium old. The Freer and Sackler galleries are both part of the Smithsonian. Admission is free.
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