Page 7 - Export Porcelain and Globakization- GOOD READ

under a transparent glaze. A decade later the export of the first Chinese blue and white
porcelain started from Jingdezhen (see plate 14). The Mongolian who have created
under their reign a huge Asian-European and inter-Asian free-trade area enabled the
emergence of blue and white porcelain by the import of cobalt from Persia and the
demand for that kind of porcelain, made for the taste of the Islamic world, in West
Asia and the Middle East. Persia and China at that time were both part of the
Mongolian empire. Outside the empire, thousands of blue and white shards from the
Yuan dynasty have been excavated: for example, in Damascus and about half a
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million broken pieces have been found in Fustat (today Cairo) . Blue and white
porcelain – which today is by and large a synonym of classical Chinese porcelain – is
in the end, a result of trade relations and the exchange of tastes during the Yuan
dynasty, which itself is a result of mixing Mongolian, Chinese, Persian, Islamic and
also Turkish or Uyghur cultural influences. Moreover, blue and white porcelain also
became the most popular ceramic in Europe – imported from China or produced
domestically for example in Delft, Meißen or Staffordshire. In the beginning of the
15th century, blue and white porcelain gained appreciation by the imperial court (first
in the Yongle period from 1403-24) and it is said that the blue and white ware in the
Xuande period (1426-1435) reached its peak in terms of fineness and art but also
reflected the exchange with the Islamic world. The porcelain vessel shapes of the
early Chinese Ming dynasty show strong Central Asian, Persian and Arabic
influences.
Initiatives in other regions to produce porcelain have partly been fostered by the
distortion of the inter-Asian and Asian-European trade due to domestic Chinese
circumstances. The export of Chinese ceramics was hampered from 1350-1360 when
the soldiers of the later Ming dynasty were fighting against Mongolian rule. With the
establishment of the Ming dynasty, the open and cosmopolitan attitude of the
Mongolian dynasty towards trade was replaced by close-door politics: officially the
Ming banned private export from 1368 until 1567. And even when this ban could not
be fully enforced, there is clear evidence of a sharp reduction of production and
trading of Chinese ceramics. The so-called “Ming gap” describes the fact that Chinese
commodities were missing in the export markets for a substantial period of time.
Close-door periods have been repeated many times during Chinese history; hopefully
the last ended in 1978 when China started its reform process after years of Maoist
isolation. During the Ming gap, the Thai kilns in Sukhothai and Si Satchanalai
originated and were able to partly substitute Chinese exports. In the 15th century,
Vietnamese ware partly substituted the missing blue and white products from China.
“The mere presence of Southeast Asian ceramics at every maritime shipwreck site
from the late 14th century to the beginning of the 16th century in proportions of sixty
to ninety-nine per cent, as opposed to 100 per cent Chinese trade ware at earlier sites,
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is itself evidence of a Chinese shortage” . During that period Thai and Vietnamese
ceramics have partly compensated the shrinking export volumes of Chinese ceramics
in the South East Asian markets. A similar distortion of trade took place during the
violent transitional period between the Ming and Qing dynasty from 1644 to 1684.
The kilns of Jiangxi province were affected by war and production stopped for more
than two decades. During this time Chinese porcelain exports to Europe were replaced
by Japanese products and by the emergence of the Dutch Faience industry in Delft.
However, even during the Ming gap the export to South East Asia never came to a
complete standstill. The best customer of Yuan and Ming blue and white ceramics was
the Ottoman court in Istanbul. The Topkapi Palace holds the biggest collection of
Chinese ceramics in the world. The Lena junk with blue and white porcelain from the
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