Page 12 - Ming Porcelain Primer

MARTABAN: MAGIC POTS FOR
SOUTH EAST ASIA

There is a group of large and sturdy stoneware jars called martaban, or martavaan in
Dutch. Where does this term come from, and to what does it refer?

One of the first mentions of the term ‘martaban’ is found in the travel records of Ibn
Battutha (1304–1368/09), one of the greatest travellers in history. He reports that in 1365
the Indian king Kalikan’s daughter presented him with four jars, ‘martabans or huge jars,
filled with pepper, citron and mango, all prepared with salt, as for a sea voyage’ (Gutman
2001).

The jars are named after the port of Martaban on the west coast of Burma (now
Myanmar), which was an important link in the China-India ceramic trade. Goods were
transported overland from China to Martaban, and from there they were shipped to West
Asia, India and Africa during the Song (960–1279) and Ming (1368–1644) eras. With the
rise of the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya in the mid-1300s, the land route also became
important, thus Arab, Indian and later European merchants stopping at Martaban would
demand large jars in which to store water, alcohol, oil, candied fruit and pickles, opium,
holy water from the Ganges and other commodities for the next stage of their journey.
Because of their desired storage function they had to close well, and so wooden, leather
or ceramic lids were used, held in place by a cord drawn through the ears on the neck.

These jars could have been produced at kilns in southern China, Thailand, Vietnam,
Khmer or the local kilns in Burma – but they were all referred to as martaban. This was not
a problem for the people who used these jars, but for the ceramic historians it turned out
to be a problem. On some of the martabans’ inventory cards from the Princessehof col-
lection one could sometimes find such information as ‘southern China or Vietnam, 13th–
18th centuries’.

The collection of martabans started with the interest of the founding director of the
museum, Nanne Ottema (1874–1955). At the time Ottema acquired his first jars it was
quite unusual for collectors of Chinese ceramics to pay attention to these rather coarse
wares. Ottema’s interest was not primarily the aesthetic appeal of the pots but rather their
function as handelsartikelen, trade wares.

Today the Princessehof Museum in Leeuwarden holds one of the most important
collections of martaban jars in the Western world, most of them found at the end of the
nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries in the South East Asian archipelago, the Dutch
East Indies.

Ref.: Gutman 2001, p. 112.
Further reading: Miedema 1964; Moore 1970; Ceramic Society of Indonesia 1976; Adhyatman and Ridho 1984; Harrisson 1986;
Roth 1992; Valdes, Lond and Barbosa 1992.

Martaban (detail, no. 36).

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