Chinese porcelain: Jingdezhen and the white gold of China

In the raking light of a workshop, a hand turns the wheel, and a mass of white clay rises, thins, becomes a perfect bowl. Further on, a painter draws with the brush, in a single sure stroke, a peony branch in cobalt blue on the still-raw paste. The kiln waits, its mouth ablaze, where the piece will enter white and dull and emerge, hours later, hard as stone and ringing clear as a bell. We are in Jingdezhen, the world capital of porcelain for a thousand years.

Chinese porcelain is that white, fine, translucent and resonant ceramic that China invented long before the rest of the world, to the point that its English name — china — simply denotes the country itself. From Jingdezhen to the imperial palaces, from the sea routes to European display cabinets, it was one of the greatest export treasures in history. To understand porcelain is to follow the trail of a know-how the West took centuries to crack.

What exactly is porcelain?#

Porcelain is distinguished from other ceramics by its material and its firing. In Chinese it is called cí, as opposed to common pottery, táo. What defines it: a paste fired at very high temperature — beyond 1,200 °C, often near 1,300 °C — to the point of vitrification, which makes it hard, watertight, of a translucent whiteness and a crystalline ring when struck.

The secret lies in two ingredients. The first is kaolin, a pure white clay — the word comes precisely from the hill of Gaoling, near Jingdezhen. The second is petuntse, a feldspathic rock which, melted in firing, binds the whole and gives its translucency. It is the exact balance of these two materials that long made Chinese porcelain unequalled.

In English, porcelain is called simply china: an entire country reduced, in the language, to the material it gave the world.

Jingdezhen, the city of fire#

No city embodies porcelain better than Jingdezhen, in Jiangxi. The site has produced ceramics since the Han, but it is under the Song emperor Jingde, at the start of the eleventh century, that it takes its present name: the court, charmed by its pieces, orders that they be marked with the name of the imperial era. The town becomes, and remains, the official capital of porcelain.

Jingdezhen had every asset: kaolin deposits within reach, forests to fuel the kilns, the Chang river to carry the goods. At the height of its glory, under the Ming and the Qing, it housed imperial kilns working exclusively for the court, and a division of labour of rare modernity: it was said that a single piece passed through the hands of dozens of artisans, each specialised in a single gesture.

Blue-and-white: the cobalt revolution#

The most famous face of Chinese porcelain is blue-and-white. The principle: paint the decoration in cobalt oxide directly on the raw paste, cover it with a transparent glaze, then fire it once. The cobalt turns deep blue, sealed under the enamel, indelible and luminous.

This technique flourishes under the Mongol Yuan dynasty (fourteenth century), nourished by trade with the Islamic world: the best cobalt then came from Persia, and many motifs and shapes were conceived for Middle Eastern customers. Under the Ming, blue-and-white reaches its perfection, with the pieces so sought after from the Yongle and Xuande eras. The motif would in turn become so coveted in Europe that it was imitated everywhere — down to the famous English willow pattern.

A thousand years of styles: from celadons to polychrome enamels#

The history of Chinese porcelain is a succession of colours and techniques. Before blue-and-white reigned the celadons, those porcelains with a jade-green glaze that the Longquan kilns brought to extreme refinement under the Song — an aesthetic of restraint, where colour arises from the very thickness of the enamel.

Then came the polychrome enamels. The Ming develop doucai (斗彩), which marries the underglaze blue to colours laid over it, and wucai (五彩, "five colours"). The Qing push further with the famille verte then the famille rose (粉彩, fěncǎi), with opaque pinks and whites imported from the West. Each dynasty, each emperor adds its palette to a repertoire of dizzying richness.

The porcelain route and the coveted secret#

From the Tang, porcelain is exported by sea: there was a true maritime porcelain route, doubling the overland Silk Road. A ninth-century wreck, the Belitung shipwreck found in Indonesia, yielded by itself tens of thousands of Chinese pieces destined for the Abbasid world — proof of the industrial scale of the trade.

From the sixteenth century, the Portuguese, Dutch and then English East India Companies flood Europe with Jingdezhen porcelain. Princes are mad for it, covering whole cabinets with it. But Europe does not know how to make it: the secret of kaolin remains Chinese. It took until 1708-1710 and the work of Johann Friedrich Böttger at Meissen, in Saxony, for a hard porcelain to be produced at last outside China, breaking a thousand-year monopoly.

Jingdezhen today: heritage and renewal#

Jingdezhen porcelain has known eclipses — the decline of the imperial kilns, industrial competition, the upheavals of the twentieth century — but the city has never fallen silent. It now draws a new generation of ceramists, Chinese and foreign, who come to work in its workshops and converted wastelands, between tradition and contemporary creation.

Porcelain remains a marker of identity and prestige: the great old pieces reach peaks at auction, and Jingdezhen's know-how is claimed as living heritage. China's "white gold" continues to turn on the wheels, to fire in the kilns, to tell the world an excellence a thousand years old.

To discover Chinese porcelain is to hold in one's hand a material that was the currency of an empire, an object of global desire and a state secret. To learn Chinese is also to grasp these words — cí, qīnghuā, gāolǐng — that tell how a white clay from Jiangxi became, in many languages, the very name of China.

FAQ#

Why is porcelain called "china" in English? Because Europe long imported its porcelain from China without knowing how to produce it. The material ended up bearing the name of its country of origin: china, in English, denotes both porcelain and China.

What distinguishes porcelain from other ceramics? Its paste, rich in kaolin, and its firing at very high temperature (near 1,300 °C) that vitrifies it: it becomes hard, watertight, white, translucent and resonant — which neither pottery nor ordinary stoneware are.

What is blue-and-white porcelain? A porcelain (青花, qīnghuā) whose decoration is painted in cobalt oxide on the raw paste, then covered with a glaze and fired. Appearing under the Yuan, perfected under the Ming, it became the most famous and most imitated style in the world.

Where was imperial porcelain made? Chiefly at Jingdezhen, in Jiangxi, capital of porcelain since the Song. The town housed imperial kilns working for the court and a highly developed organisation of labour, each artisan specialising in one step.

Photo credits: the images used in this article come from Pexels and Unsplash and are royalty-free.