Page 235 - Chinese and japanese porcelain silk and lacquer Canepa

and globular or elephant-shaped kendis, are thus far recorded for the first time in a
Figs. 3.3.1.1.12a and b Fragment of a
blue-and-white bowl from an unidentified
shipwreck, known as Angra D (early
seventeenth century)
Jingdezhen kilns, Jiangxi province
Ming dynasty, Wanli/Tianqi reign (1573–1627)
Centro de História de Além-Mar (CHAM),
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Research has brought to light a few shards of blue-and-white porcelain recovered
from an unidentified shipwreck, known as Angra D, in Angra do Heroísmo Bay in
632 See Canepa, 2010, figs. 10 and 7, respectively.
Terceira, Azores, which played an important role in both Spanish and Portuguese 633 Mentioned in Canepa, 2011/1, pp. 60–61.
634 Two years later, the galleon Jesus Maria while
maritime trade routes (Appendix 3). These include a shard that most probably sailing from Acapulco to Guam, and then to Cavite,
643
formed part of the rim of a Jingdezhen plate of rather ordinary quality with a phoenix rescued 260 survivors of the Santa Margarita. Fish,
2011, p. 499.
design within a diamond and trigram border, similar those discussed earlier that were 635 I am grateful to Jack Harbeston, IOTA Partners,
for providing me with images of the porcelain
recovered from Spanish shipwrecks and excavated at Lagos in southern Portugal. This recovered from the shipwreck.
shipwreck, believed to be a Spanish ship that sunk in the beginning of the seventeenth 636 Personal communication with Jack Harbeston,
December 2007.
century, also yielded a fragment of the base of a bowl bearing the mark Da Ming 637 William M. Mathers, Henry S. Parker III, PhD, and
Kathleen A. Copus (eds.), Archaeological Report.
nian zao (Made in the Great Ming dynasty), made at a private Jingdezhen kiln The Recovery Of The Manila Galleon Nuestra
(Figs. 3.3.1.1.12a and b) (Appendices 2 and 3). 644 Señora de la Concepción, Pacific Sea Resources,
Sutton, 1990; William M. Mathers, ‘Nuestra Señora
Additional material evidence of the various types of porcelain imported into New de la Concepción’, National Geographic, vol. 178,
No. 3, September 1990, pp. 39–53; Maura Rinaldi,
Spain is provided by a large number of porcelain shards that have been excavated in ‘The Ceramic Cargo of the Nuestra Señora de la
Manila. Finds include both Jingdezhen and Zhangzhou porcelain ranging from high to Concepción’, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic
Society, Vol. 57, 1992–1993, pp. 95–96; and William
rather low quality. Shards that formed part of a variety of Kraak bowls, dishes, saucer M. Mathers and Nancy Shaw, Treasure of the
Concepción, Hong Kong, 1993.
dishes and plates with continuous or panelled rim borders, shards of saucer dishes with 638 Maura Rinaldi, ‘The Ceramic Cargo of the
white or blue lotus-petal borders as well as shards of rectangular or oval covered boxes Concepción’, in Mathers, Parker III, and Copus,
1990, pp. 406-418, pls. 3a, 6a, b, c and d, 8a, b and c,
were excavated from three sites in Intramuros: the Ayuntamiento, the Baston de San 10a and b, 12, 13a, b and c, 14a and b, 15a and b, 16a
and b, 17a and b, and 20a.
Diego and the Parian sites. 645 These sites also yielded shards of Zhangzhou blue-and- 639 Ibid., pp. 418–419, pl. 21a.
white dishes, saucer dishes and plates, as well as of dishes decorated with overglaze 640 This is further suggested by the fact that many
bases of the cups found bear apocryphal Chenghua
enamels or with raised white porcelain clay slip on a pale greenish-white celadon reign marks like those recovered from the other two
shipwrecks. Ibid., p. 419, pl. 22a and b and 23a and b.
glaze. 646 In the north of Isla Hermosa (present-day Taiwan), which was occupied by 641 Ibid., p. 427, pls. 30a and b.
the Spanish from 1626 to 1646, there was a casual find of a Kraak shard. This 642 Ibid., pp. 428–429, pls. 40a and b.
647
643 I am grateful to Catarina Garcia for providing me
shard, unearthed in the vicinity of Fort Santo Domingo at Tamsui, shows a similar with images of the porcelain shards recovered
from the shipwreck. The shards are tiny, thus it is
rim decoration to that of a dish reconstructed from shards recovered from the Nuestra very difficult to identify the type of pieces that they
Señora de la Limpia y Pura Concepción (1641) and the Hatcher junk (c.1643). This originally formed part.
644 I am grateful to José Bettencourt and Catarina
suggests that Kraak was among the porcelain purchased by the Spanish in Isla Hermosa Garcia, Centro de História de Além-Mar (CHAM),
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, for providing me with
to be shipped to Manila, and then via the trans-Pacific trade route to New Spain and information on the Agra D shipwreck, and images
subsequently re-exported via the trans-Atlatic trade route to Spain. of the porcelain recovered from the wreck site. The
shard is published in Catarina Garcia, ‘Preliminary
To sum up, the overwhelming majority of the porcelain imported into New Spain assessment of the daily life on board an Iberian ship
from the beginning of the 17th century (Terceira,
by the Manila Galleons in the last decades of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century Açores)’, in Marinella Pasquinucci and Timm Welski
was blue-and-white porcelain from Jingdezhen. Most consisted of Kraak porcelain of (eds.), Close Encounters: Sea- and Riverborne
Trade, Ports and Hinterlands, Ship Construction
open forms, including dishes, saucer dishes, plates and bowls of various sizes. Closed and Navigation in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and
in Modern Time, BAR International Series 1283,
forms, such as covered boxes, pear-shaped bottles, jars, pomegranate-shaped ewers Oxford, 2004, p. 168, fig. 10.
234 Silk, Porcelain and Lacquer
shipwreck in 1600, on the cargo of the San Diego. The quality of the Kraak porcelain in
most cargoes was mixed, ranging from very fine to rather crude. A change to simplified
methods of production at the private kilns of Jingdezhen over time seems evident, as
many pieces in the earlier cargoes were moulded but by the late 1630s, pieces had no
longer moulded decoration. From the very beginning the cargoes included a small
quantity of the cruder blue-and-white porcelain made at the private kilns of Zhangzhou,
of both open and closed forms. Furthermore, Kinrande and other porcelains decorated
with overglaze enamels appear to have been imported only in small amounts, and
not regularly. It is unclear if this was due to the tastes of the multi-ethnic clientele in
the New World, or the amount of porcelain with colour overglaze enamel decoration
brought to Manila by the Chinese junk traders and Portuguese.
As noted in section 1.1.2 of Chapter I, after the Manila Galleon reached Acapulco
in the mid-December, the porcelain alongside other Chinese goods (including silk, as
shown in Chapter II), were sold at the annual wholesale and retail fair that was held
in Acapulco in the month of February, which was attended by merchants from both
viceroyalties, New Spain and Peru. Most of the porcelain, intended for consumption
in New Spain, was carried inland on an arduous mule train over the mountains to
Mexico City, where it was sold in the city market housed in a building southeast of
the cathedral (present-day Zócalo area, the historic centre of the city). The exotic
nature, beauty, translucense and durability of the porcelain made it a highly desirable
commodity and thus coveted not only by the Spanish colonial elite, clergy and
wealthy merchant class of New Spain but also by other residents of lower socio-
economic classes.
Textual sources provide important evidence of a large-scale consumption of
porcelain among the multi-ethnic colonial society of Mexico City, in contrast to what
we saw ocurred in Madrid, Seville and other urban cities of Spain. Probate inventories
of the belongings of 128 residents of the city dating from 1580 to 1630 recently studied
by Gasch-Tomás have shown that almost 24.2 percent include porcelain, giving an
average of 13 pieces of porcelain per inventory. The study also revealed that around
648
645 Takenori Nogami, Wilfredo P. Ronquillo, Alfredo 80 percent of the inventories of individuals with patrimonies valued in 100,000 to
B. Orogo, Nida T. Cuevas and Kazuhiko Tanaka,
‘Porcelains from Manila in Spanish Philippines’, 1,000,000 maravedís who belonged to the elites or at least were well-to-do residents,
Departmental Bulletin Paper, Kanazawa University,
No. 28, 2006, pp. 39–51, figs. 7–20. I am greatly such as craftsmen and bureaucrats, had Asian goods; and that most inventories
indebted to Nogami Takenori, Arita History and valued at 50,000 to 100,000 maravedís had at least 1 Asian commodity. These data
649
Folklore Museum, Japan, for providing me with
research material on the excavations carried out in indicate that porcelain and other Asian goods imported into New Spain were more
Manila in 2004–2005.
646 bid., pp. 40–42, figs. 8–10, p. 44, fig. 12, p. 48, fig. 16, numerous and cheaper than in Spain (Seville, for example), and that the demand was
I
and p. 51, fig. 20. more diversified among social classes in Mexico City. According to Gasch-Tomás
650
I
647 n 1626, the Spanish established a settlement and
built Fort San Salvador at Keelung, incorporating over 50 percent of the Spaniards and Creoles of Mexico City consumed Asian goods,
Isla Hermosa in the Manila-Acapulco trade route.
Three years later, they built Fort San Domingo at which would have belonged to the highest elites such as noblemen, clergymen and
Tamsui on the north-western coast of the island. wholesale merchants; and middle elites such as Crown employees, craftsmen, low
In 1642, however, the Dutch who were at war with
the Spanish over the Moluccas, expelled them from and middle merchants, shopkeepers, professionals, and even some poor residents. 651
Keelung and temporarily took over the island. I am
grateful to Tai-kang Lu, Tainan National University This high level of porcelain consumption in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
of the Arts, for providing me with information and centuries, as demonstrated by both Gasch-Tomás and Krahe, was unattainable in
images of the porcelain found in Taiwan.
648 Gasch-Tomás, 2012, p. 260, Table 6.3 and p. 262. Spain. Interestingly, the data provided by Gasch-Tomás show that the middle elites
649 Ibid., pp. 268–269.
650 Ibid., p. 269. of both Mexico City and Seville acquired more pieces of porcelain than the wealthiest
I
651 t is important to consider, however, that the elites. The reason for this may partly lie in the tastes of the wealthiest elites of New
inventories only show the belongings of the white
residents of Mexico City, as mestizos, mulattoes and Spain, who as the members of the royal court back in Spain, preferred to acquire
indigenous people did not make inventories when
they died. Gasch-Tomás, 2012, p. 270. tableware made of silver rather than of porcelain to both use at their dining tables and
Trade in Chinese Porcelain 235