Jingdezhen porcelain

Blue and white emerged under the Yuan, in the fourteenth century, from the meeting of Jingdezhen kaolin and cobalt imported from Persia: the design is painted on the raw body then covered in glaze, and firing at 1,300 degrees fixes everything at once. In the eighteenth century the imperial kilns employed tens of thousands of people in an extreme division of labour, a contemporary treatise breaking production into seventy-two distinct operations. Exported to Europe by the million, the porcelain remained a technical mystery there until Meissen in 1708.