China's Porcelain Capital

The Rise, Fall and Reinvention of Ceramics in Jingdezhen

Maris Boyd Gillette

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781474259439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Maris Boyd Gillette's groundbreaking study tells the story of Jingdezhen, China's porcelain capital, from its origins in 1004 in Song dynasty China to the present day. Gillette explores how Jingdezhen has been affected by state involvement in porcelain production, particularly during the long 20th century. She considers how the Chinese government has consumed, invested in, taxed and managed the local ceramics industry, and the effects of this state intervention on ceramists' lives, their local environment and the nature of the goods they produce. Gillette traces how Jingdezhen experienced the transition from imperial rule to state ownership under communism, the changing fortunes of the ceramics industry in the early 21st century, the decay and decline that accompanied privatisation, and a revival brought about by an entrepreneurial culture focusing on the manufacture of highly-prized 'art porcelain'.

1

The World’s Most Famous Ceramics and the People Who Made Them

Jingdezhen. For many, the name is synonymous with fine porcelain. The Louvre, the British Museum, the Smithsonian, the Vatican Museums, the Hermitage, the Topkapi Saray, and many, many other institutions around the world have porcelain from Jingdezhen, China. Art historians describe its qualities and significance with superlatives, noting its formal perfection, refined decoration, and lasting influence on world ceramics. Collectors pay astronomical sums for Jingdezhen porcelain: for example, on 10 April 2014, CNN reported that Sotheby’s sold a fifteenth-century ‘chicken cup’, a tiny bowl painted with two roosters and a chicken tending her young, for $36.05 million USD.¹ The world’s best-known ceramics manufacturers, including Wedgwood, Sevres, Meissen, Rörstrand, and others, were founded to compete with Jingdezhen. Numerous contemporary artists, of whom Ai Weiwei may be the best known, take inspiration from Jingdezhen porcelain, and travel to the city to create works.

And what is this porcelain? Jingdezhen ceramists have produced an incredible variety of wares over their long history of manufacture. The icy-blue glazed celadons called qingbai or yingqing – thinly potted ceramics with a hard white body incised and impressed with naturalistic designs and covered by a translucent glaze – were Jingdezhen’s first porcelain to achieve international renown. From the tenth through to the fourteenth centuries, qingbai were enormously popular in China and traded widely throughout Asia (see Plate 1). Numerous kiln sites across south China tried to replicate Jingdezhen’s celadons; according to ceramics scholars Rose Kerr and Nigel Wood, ‘few wares in China’s ceramic history have been copied more frequently and over a broader area than Ching-te-chen [Jingdezhen] chhing-pai [qingbai] ware’.²

Better known in Europe and North America is blue and white porcelain (qinghuaci), a striking innovation in world ceramics history that Jingdezhen ceramists began making in the early fourteenth century. The first blue and white wares were larger, stronger forms than the celadons, and painted with surface designs in cobalt pigment under a translucent glaze (see Plate 2). Near-Eastern scholar John Carswell suggests that Persian merchants played a role in the creation of this new commodity, by bringing to China the cobalt used for the surface design, and supplying the Persian metalwork and glass that influenced the shape and decoration of the wares.³ Over four centuries, blue and white porcelain captured an enormous, transnational market, becoming the most widely traded ware in world history. Jingdezhen blue and white stimulated numerous imitations, in China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Turkey, Persia, Egypt, and Syria.⁴ The potters of Delft made the best-known European blue and white ceramics, but ceramists in Italy, England, Germany and elsewhere also produced Jingdezhen-inspired blue and white wares.

Many other innovations accompanied these two breakthroughs. Jingdezhen ceramists used other pigments for underglaze decorations, and painted coloured enamels over the glaze, adding an additional firing at lower temperatures to harden the surfaces. They created numerous glazes, deep monochromes in yellow, red, and purple, and multicoloured flambé and peach-bloom. They trailed white slip (liquid clay) on the surface of pots, and glazed between the raised lines with turquoise, purple, and yellow to create porcelain like cloisonné (fahuaci). They made wares that resembled lacquer, wood, stone, jade, and fruit and vegetables. They replicated pots from kiln sites in other parts of China and wares made by their predecessors. Jingdezhen ceramists produced porcelain for all sorts of Chinese tastes, and for international consumers who craved distinctly different forms and surface decoration. From the simplest to the most baroque designs, from the tiniest and most delicate to the sturdiest and most vigorous forms, wares for use at the table and in industry, for collection and construction – Jingdezhen producers have made them all. Jingdezhen has played such an important role in world trade that some believe the town gave China its English-language name. Prior to 1004, Jingdezhen was called Changnanzhen, the town south of the Chang River. A few ceramists told me that if you say ‘Changnan’ over and over, it sounds like the English word ‘China’.⁵ Others remarked that in English, both porcelain and the country of its origin are called ‘china’, which they took as a sign of Jingdezhen’s significance.

Collectors, connoisseurs, and historians have written in multiple languages about Jingdezhen’s porcelain for more than 500 years. For 300 years, a smaller group of government officials, industrial spies, and aficionados have described the technical processes by which Jingdezhen porcelain is made, often with illustrations. Yet when it comes to the people who throw, press, and decorate these renowned and treasured wares, little has been published – even though Jingdezhen stands out from other ceramics production sites for the sheer number of people who work in porcelain manufacturing. Fang Lili, an ethnographer, historian, and artist born in Jingdezhen, wrote the two most important books about the city’s ceramists. Her Chinese-language texts investigate nineteenth- and late twentieth-century potters, painters, kiln workers, seconds-sellers, and others who participated in making the city’s prized commodity.⁶ In English we have no full-length studies of Jingdezhen’s ceramists. Shorter publications are scattered in journals, catalogues, trade magazines, and chapters of edited volumes.⁷

In this book, I write about the artists, artisans, and workers who made Jingdezhen’s porcelain, focusing on the period from the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) through the first decade of the twenty-first century. I investigate the conditions under which ceramists could make a good living from porcelain manufacturing, and the circumstances which made that difficult. A key player in ceramists’ success or failure, happiness or misery, has been the government. How the Chinese state consumed, invested in, taxed, and managed Jingdezhen porcelain has profoundly shaped ceramists’ lives, the local environment, and the quality, quantity, and types of wares produced.

Jingdezhen’s story will fascinate those who are interested in ceramics or Asian art. Jingdezhen came to be the porcelain capital because of its unique system of manufacture that enabled ceramists to produce large quantities of exquisite porcelain without mechanical assistance. This system arose from conjoining state intervention and local social formations. For students of modern Chinese history, Jingdezhen’s trajectory adds depth and dimension to the national narrative, and problematizes what we think we know about China. Many scholars regard Chinese Communist Party rule as a radical break with China’s imperial past, and indeed, the Chinese Communist Party put an end to many long-standing social practices and cultural beliefs. Yet when it comes to porcelain manufacture, the Party under Mao Zedong built on and extended key imperial policies rather than rejecting them. Jingdezhen’s most radical break with history occurred when the government decided to privatize the porcelain industry in the late twentieth century. Readers interested in industry, labour, and capitalism may reconsider their understandings of economic growth from seeing how China’s porcelain capital developed over time. While Jingdezhen’s initial success in global trade had much to do with its monopoly commodity – true porcelain, made from naturally kaolinized china stone – big government was essential to manufacturing’s expansion, the high quality of wares created, and a thriving local economy. After Jingdezhen became a massive ceramics producer, state management, investment, and consumption kept the industry strong. Only when the government withdrew from Jingdezhen, whether because of state failure, economic policy decisions, or both, did manufacturing decline, the economy shrink, and ceramists suffer. In this history lie lessons for those who want to understand the political and economic arrangements that undergird the health of manufacturers around the world.

The basics: Clay, fuel, and transportation

Before Jingdezhen became a massive modern and pre-modern manufacturing complex, before the Song dynasty emperor Zhenzong set off the town’s industrial development by admiring its icy-blue celadons, before local farmers began making ceramics during the agricultural slack season, was Jingdezhen’s china stone. Today this distinctive resource draws ceramists from thousands of kilometres away to Jingdezhen. It differs not only from the materials that Europeans and Americans use to make porcelain, but also from the clays that north China potters employ.

Jingdezhen porcelain is not made from true clay. Clay usually comes from the weathering of volcanic rocks that are high in feldspar. By contrast, Jingdezhen porcelain is made from a rock that is high in mica. This stone, called china stone, petunse, or porcelain stone (cishi), produces ceramics that are extremely white, pure, and translucent. It naturally has low levels of clay (kaolin) mixed in, but only between 10 and 20 per cent. China stone can be found in south China, Korea, and Japan – and nowhere else.⁸ It is abundant in Jingdezhen. Even now the local government estimates that Jingdezhen has at least 300 more years of china stone to mine.⁹

Today’s ceramists use approximately the same methods to turn china stone into a clay-like material as ceramists did in the eleventh century. The first step is to mine the china stone, either from an open quarry or underground. The next is to pulverize it. Jingdezhen’s residents have long harnessed the area’s many streams to power mallets that pound china stone to a fine powder. In the early twenty-first century, visitors could still see this type of water wheel and crusher at work (see Plate 3). Government officials pushed ceramics producers to switch to mechanized crushers in 1955, but the practice of using water-powered mallets never stopped completely.¹⁰ After the stone is pulverized, the clay maker levigates it in water, to separate the coarse from the fine material (see Plate 4). Then s/he ladles the muddy stone out of the water and lets it dry and stiffen. Workers use a simple wooden form to shape the material into small white bricks or bai dunzi.¹¹ This phrase is the basis for the English word ‘petunse’, a synonym for china stone. Potters buy the bricks and mix the china stone with water to make the equivalent of clay. Processing is arduous, particularly if one does it manually. In 2005, I apprenticed to a potter who made replicas of fourteenth and fifteenth-century blue and white porcelain. We stamped the muddy china stone with our feet to distribute the water and remove air – the same method potters used in the fourteenth century, and probably earlier.

Prepared china stone is wonderful and difficult as a medium for forming. My master instructed me in the local method, which is to throw thick forms off the hump and trim extensively after the pot dries, when it is brittle and easy to break. China stone ‘clay’ is very soft and pliable, and shapes easily on a potter’s wheel, but it is not very strong. Qingbai was made from this single stone, and potters threw small pieces. In the late thirteenth century, ceramists began adding kaolin, a true clay, to the mix. This allowed them to make the large chargers, dishes, urns, and vases that we associate with the blue and white porcelain of the Yuan or Mongol dynasty (1260–1368).

The word ‘kaolin’ comes from the Chinese phrase for ‘high ridge’ (gaoling), which is the name of a range of hills near Jingdezhen. Gaoling has true clay, and at various times over Jingdezhen’s history ceramists have mixed more or less kaolin with china stone to make their medium....