The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World

"This is a wonderful book. Anne Gerritsen is a historian of China, of the Song and early Ming dynasties. She was a literary historian, but she worked on the region in China where the great city of Jingdezhen was located, in the Jiangxi region. Anna Gerritsen teaches at Warwick University, and she regarded herself as a local historian. But the local historians in the history department there at that time were mostly European historians, and they had a peculiar preconception that a Chinese historian was a modern historian. So they did not engage with her. I had started an 18th-century reading group at Warwick, and we were discussing consumption and luxury goods. The luxury good I myself was very interested in at that time was porcelain, its development and how it was imitated in Europe, and more generally the impact of Asian luxury goods on Europe. There was this great city that produced most of the porcelain for China and for the world in her region of study, and she started to research the city as a local historian. “The fine ceramics of the world were all produced in this one place in China” So her book is an urban history. It’s a history of how the fine ceramics of the world were all produced in this one place in China, up until Europe and other places learned the porcelain recipe in the early 18th century. Nearly all of that blue and white porcelain that is so famous all over the world was produced from this one city. The city held huge factories, far beyond the extent and the size of any factory in the European industrial revolution. This is a great, scholarly book, an urban history, a history of porcelain, a history of the migrant workforce that was brought into this city, to work in these huge kilns. These kilns produced whatever anybody wanted. They were very receptive to all the different design techniques. And there were huge markets in the Middle East and South east Asia. The Koran stated that it was not right to eat off gold and silver. Wealthy and even more middle status Islamic consumers ate off porcelain. The significance of this place, Jingdezhen, needed to be told to the world, and this is the book which has done so. There were other porcelain centres and they produced different types of porcelain. The production of porcelain certainly goes back into the Tang Dynasty. It’s an ancient craft, and was produced in different parts of China in during the Song Dynasty, too. But it’s really from the 12th century onwards that we see the development in this region, and it’s particularly important as a world centre during the Ming Dynasty from the 14th century onwards. It’s a big centre still. There was an exhibition in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern not so many years ago by Ai Weiwei, his great sunflower seed exhibition. All of those sunflowers seeds were made of porcelain and hand painted in Jingdezhen, and there were probably millions of them. The people of Jingdezhen, at that point, didn’t seem to know about their significance in the world. But they were very grateful to Ai Weiwei, who had given them good work for some time producing all of these flowerseeds. There’s also a famous shard market in Jingdezhen because builders and many others are digging up all these shards of these ancient porcelains, even now."