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    Porcelain With Local and Global Story

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    Liping Zhu
    The document discusses how the author uses broken pieces of Chinese porcelain, or "sherds", to teach students about global connections between China and Europe from 1500-1800. [1] The author begins lessons by having students closely examine sherds, including one that is a distorted blue and white cup. [2] By looking closely, students can still identify decorative patterns and realize it was meant to be a cup. [3] The author then provides context about the porcelain's origins in 18th century China and how its willow pattern design circulated globally, demonstrating the exchange of ideas, goods and people.

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    Porcelain With Local and Global Story

    Uploaded by

    Liping Zhu
    22 views3 pages
    The document discusses how the author uses broken pieces of Chinese porcelain, or "sherds", to teach students about global connections between China and Europe from 1500-1800. [1] The author begins lessons by having students closely examine sherds, including one that is a distorted blue and white cup. [2] By looking closely, students can still identify decorative patterns and realize it was meant to be a cup. [3] The author then provides context about the porcelain's origins in 18th century China and how its willow pattern design circulated globally, demonstrating the exchange of ideas, goods and people.

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    The document discusses how the author uses broken pieces of Chinese porcelain, or "sherds", to teach students about global connections between China and Europe from 1500-1800. [1] The author begins lessons by having students closely examine sherds, including one that is a distorted blue and white cup. [2] By looking closely, students can still identify decorative patterns and realize it was meant to be a cup. [3] The author then provides context about the porcelain's origins in 18th century China and how its willow pattern design circulated globally, demonstrating the exchange of ideas, goods and people.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    22 views3 pages

    Porcelain With Local and Global Story

    Uploaded by

    Liping Zhu
    The document discusses how the author uses broken pieces of Chinese porcelain, or "sherds", to teach students about global connections between China and Europe from 1500-1800. [1] The author begins lessons by having students closely examine sherds, including one that is a distorted blue and white cup. [2] By looking closely, students can still identify decorative patterns and realize it was meant to be a cup. [3] The author then provides context about the porcelain's origins in 18th century China and how its willow pattern design circulated globally, demonstrating the exchange of ideas, goods and people.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 3

    Porcelain with a Local and Global Story

    Anne Gerritsen1
    1 Department of History, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom

    E-mail: [email protected]

    People sometimes ask me if I, myself collect the Chinese porcelain that I write about. The question itself suggests
    they are not collectors themselves. Anyone who collects porcelain knows that it is extremely unlikely that a
    university professor who began being interested in porcelain about ten years ago could afford to buy collectable
    pieces of Chinese porcelain. The prices individual pieces of porcelain fetch range from thousands of dollars for quite
    ordinary pieces to hundreds of thousands of dollars and even millions of dollars for some of the finest pieces that
    were once part of the collection of the emperor. Of course, with the market so buoyant, imitations and fakes
    circulate as widely as the genuine pieces and distinguishing between them is the major challenge that faces museum
    curators and collectors alike. It is, however, possible to buy broken pieces of porcelain known as sherds in small
    antique shops and markets in China. Over the years, I have collected some of these sherds, including the piece in
    Figure 1.

    Figure 1. Sherd in the collection of the author.

    Detours Vol. 2, No. 1 (2021) 67 BCSSTA


    One of the classes I teach is on China’s global history, from 1500 to 1800, which asks how the history of China is
    connected to the histories of other parts of the world. Porcelain, also referred to as china, is an excellent primary
    source for understanding the exchange of knowledge and ideas between Asia and Europe. When I arrive in class
    with some broken pieces of porcelain in a cardboard box, the students usually stare at me somewhat blankly. I place
    the pieces on a cloth in the middle of the table and ask them to select one of the pieces. My next question is simply:
    ‘What can you tell me about what you have in front of you?’ I encourage them to look closely, and describe
    everything they see, including the smallest details they can see and feel as they turn the pieces in their hands.
    More often than not, the person who ends with the object in Figure 1 feels a little hard done by. ‘It’s ugly’, I have
    heard more than once, or, ‘What on earth happened to this?’ They would have preferred to pick a shiny fragment of
    white porcelain with a decoration in blue that depicts something they think they can identify.
    Once they settle down to look closely, however, they realise there is a lot to comment on. However squashed the
    shape is now, it is not impossible to see that it was once intended to be a cup; some even see the little bit sticking out
    on the right hand side and see it might once have been a handle. Whatever the crumbly material that is now stuck to
    the surface may be, it is clear that underneath that is a bright white surface with blue decorations, even recognisable
    as a multi-story building with a tree to the left of the building. ‘It reminds me of some of the blue and white plates
    you see in bed-and-breakfast places’, one student exclaimed once. Few observe the metallic colour that covers the
    thin rim of the cup. It is hard to guess what exactly happened to it; some think it must have been damaged in
    transport; only someone who knows a little bit about the effects of high heat inside the kiln on the kaolin-clay
    combination that makes up a porcelain body can identify that whatever happened to it already happened inside the
    kiln when it was fired.
    I only fill in the details after the students’ thoughts have completely come to a halt. I explain that it was probably
    made during the late eighteenth century in the kilns of Jingdezhen in southern China, where most of the millions of
    pieces of porcelain made for export to Europe were produced. We discuss the decorative pattern, sometimes referred
    to as ‘willow pattern’, featuring a pavilion in a garden next to a lake, often with a little boat and doves flying above.
    The pattern is in fact a late eighteenth-century English creation, with a popular story about two lovers who elope and
    transform into birds to match, based on the Chinese landscapes that arrived in Britain on pieces of porcelain. The
    Chinese copied the British willow pattern, which was itself a copy of Chinese designs. The cup on the left shows
    what the shape and the design might have been intended to look like.

    Figure 2. Tea cup and sherd, both in the collection of the author.

    The circulation of designs, ideas, materials and people is also visible in the shape. This cup was made for the
    consumption of tea or coffee; chocolate cups usually had a slightly different shape. All these hot beverages came
    into the food and drinking cultures of Europe and North America from other parts of the world and all were
    consumed with the sugar that was grown on colonial plantations and produced through the labour of enslaved
    peoples. One single cup allows for the telling of many different global stories, that connect both to the past and to
    the present.

    Detours Vol. 2, No. 1 (2021) 68 BCSSTA


    Bibliography

    Campen, Jan van, and Titus M. Eliëns, eds., Chinese and Japanese Porcelain for the Dutch Golden Age. Zwolle: Waanders,
    2014.

    Craciun, Adriana, and Simon Schaffer, eds. The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences. London: Palgrave, 2016.

    Gerritsen, Anne, and Giorgio Riello, eds. The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern
    World. London: Routledge, 2016.

    Gerritsen, Anne. The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University
    Press, 2020.

    Gerritsen, Anne, and Giorgio Riello, eds. Writing Material Culture History. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

    Priyadarshini, Meha. Chinese Porcelain in Colonial Mexico: The Material Worlds of an Early Modern Trade. London: Palgrave
    Macmillan, 2018.

    Detours Vol. 2, No. 1 (2021) 69 BCSSTA

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