The first book I finished this year is one I checked out from the library for my partner, but ended up reading myself before she got the chance.
How to Read Chinese Ceramics is a tour through the history of Chinese pottery, as well as a tour through the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. Author Denise Patty Leidy is one of the curators of the Met's Asian art collection, and reading it does feel a bit like touring a museum.
The 41 primary objects get full-page full-color photos (plus close-ups on key details) and a couple pages of description. There's also almost always photos of one or two similar objects for comparison, or more rarely, a reproduction of a painting from the time, either depicting the potters at work, or someone using a similar finished object.
In my reading, the history of Chinese pottery can be divided into four main eras. The earliest Chinese pottery was porous and unglazed, with decorations painted on after firing, making it especially fragile. Its purpose was to be buried in tombs to accompany the deceased into the afterlife. You got a lot of figurines of dancers and musicians - the famous Terra Cotta Soldiers are a well-known example. The few dishes in this era are copies of the sort of metal dishes people actually used. This era goes from prehistoric times to maybe sometime around 600 AD and the Tang dynasty.
At that point, there is a switch, a pottery starts being made for use rather than just display, to be enjoyed by the living, rather than buried with the dead. For like the next 700 years, you get a flowering of diversity as kiln complexes all over China each start cultivating their own unique local style. In this period, you see influence from trade with Japan and with the Muslim world to the west. Among the few recurring motifs I saw were floral decorations, and use of the pale green glaze that Westerners call 'celadon.' (Apparently in China at the time, this was associated with the Yue-region kilns. Celadon as a name seems to come from a character in a French pastoral romance.)
Around 1300 AD, during the Yuan dynasty, you get a seismic change. Potters in the Jingdezhen region started making white porcelain ceramics with painted cobalt blue underglaze decorations and clear glaze. Leidy calls this one of the most important inventions in the history of ceramics. It's fair to say that people went a bit crazy for it.
Very rapidly, the regional styles vanish, production is centralized in Jingdezhen, and 'china' as the name for porcelain dishes is born. All over the world, local potters start copying the style as best they can, usually using white slip over darker clay, but for like 400 years, no one else can figure out how to make porcelain, and real china from China is one of the most prestigious and expensive exports that money can buy. (The Yuan dynasty ends fairly early in this period, and is succeeded by the Ming dynasty, whose name in the West is also more-or-less synonymous with blue and white ceramics.)
Around 1700, a few things happen. The transition from the Ming dynasty to the Qing dynasty was apparently rather rocky, and caused slow-downs of pottery production and export. Potters in Japan and Germany independently figure out how to make real porcelain instead of an obviously inferior facsimile. And the Dutch push out the Portugese as China's primary European trading partner, and are considerably more ruthless in their dealings.
So in this fourth era, China is no longer the single dominant world source of china, and maybe no longer the most prestigious. Japanese potters copied the Chinese style but used full color instead of only blue; at this time Chinese potters start experimenting with other colored glazes and enamels to copy the Japanese! (The Dutch still want blue and white ware with traditional, perhaps stereotypical, decorations.) You get a reemergence of some of the local diversity that vanished overnight when porcelain was discovered.
The newest piece in the Met's collection that Leidy shares was made during the Chinese Republic that followed the Qing dynasty and was overthrown by Mao's revolution. The fate of Chinese pottery in the Communist era is a question for another book.
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