Page 13 - Zhangzhou Or Swatow The Collection of Zhangzhou Ware at the Princessehof Museum, Leeuwarden, Netherlands

The Kilns of Zhangzhou Ware inhoudidddd

The Excavations of the Zhangzhou Kilns

Zhangzhou (Swatow) wares have unique characteristics which stand out from the production in Jingdezhen,
Jiangxi province, the “porcelain capital” of China since ancient times.

Unlike the fine material used to make porcelain in the kilns of Jingdezhen, Zhangzhou ware has a much coarser
quality and a different craftsmanship, which gives this ware its distinguishing marks.

For the kilns, where “Swatow” wares were supposed to be produced, a number of kilns sites were suggested in
the south of China, mainly in the provinces Fujian and Guangdong, where for centuries ceramics for the local
market, but also for export was made in numbers of minyao, private kilns.
In the early 1980’s , shards of blue and white wares had been recovered from several kiln sites of minyao in
Pinghe county, Fujian province. As a result of as series of systematic archaeological excavations in the 1990’s ,
the kilns producing what was called “Swatow” were finally recovered in the region of Zhangzhou prefecture in
the south of Fujian province.
Chinese archaeologists, with support from Japanese research institutions, excavated a number of kilns as the
production sites of Zhangzhou ware: Wanyaoshan and Dongkou in the hills of Pinghe, Huzilou in Nansheng,
Dalong and Erlong in Wuzhai, Xiuzhuang, Guanbei and Zhucuo in Zhao’an, Pingshu in Zhangpu, Huotian in
Yunxiao, Meiling in Nanjing and Dongzi in Hua’an. There are probably more kiln sites to be discovered.

It seems the town of Zhangzhou served as a kind of assembly point for the products of the local kilns before
they were shipped abroad. It therefore became customary not only with Chinese archaeologists and ceramic
historians, but also internationally, to refer to the types of wares produced around Zhangzhou as “Zhangzhou
ceramics” or “Zhangzhou ware” instead of the familiar, but misleading and historically no longer justified term
“Swatow”.

Ref.: Canepa 2006; Canepa 2012 (Chinese); Li 2006; Li 2007; Crick 2010

Excavated shards of Zhangzhou ware

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