1/4 Treasures of Chinese Porcelain

this little chinese bowl once belonged to queen elizabeth the first it's made of a material which was unknown in europe until the 1500s and when that material arrived it caused a sensation in the 16th century porcelain became a cult item amongst the very wealthy the intelligentsia and the aristocracy kept porcelain in their cabinets of curiosity by the 18th century the fever had spread to the middle classes people are so mad for it that they're getting into debt they're going bust they're wasting their families well the making of porcelain was shrouded in mystery european potters tried in vain to copy it chinese porcelain is probably really the most misunderstood material in ceramic history the insatiable demand created a global trade the blue and white imagery on the wares changed our idea of what was beautiful the british dining table would never be the same again i had porcelain fever for most of my life and the best way to tell the story of how blue and white porcelain arrived in the west from china is to go there i'm going to the source to one of the world's first industrial cities i'll follow the route taken by millions of cups plates and bowls to try to find out why these wares were so prized then and now it's a story right for the telling because now it's the chinese who got the fever the new emperors are buying back their history making chinese porcelain some of the most expensive art ever to come under the hammer one million pounds ladies and gentlemen one million five hundred thousand one million seven hundred thousand the victoria and albert museum in london is home to objects that define the british on the sixth floor there's a collection about control and our ability to lose it between the 17th and 18th centuries the aristocrats and merchants of england became increasingly hungry for chinese porcelain at its height in the mid 18th century it's estimated that over two million pieces of porcelain arrived in london and that was at a time when the whole population of these islands was no more than around six million it wasn't just this magical white translucent material that interested them but it was the images of a far distant mysterious place cafe china over the years i've been involved with many ceramic valuations my job's been to look at vases plates dishes owned by people whose ancestors just had to have them whether they were new at the time or had become antiques and it's those successive waves of chinamania which have brought us these fabulous national collections that we have but how did this love affair with chinese porcelain start how was the trade regulated and just what was it that gave it its value was it the nature of the porcelain itself or did it have something to do with the complexity of bringing it from china to europe like any consumer craze it started with a gap in the market in europe in the 16th or 17th century all you would have seen were stonewares and earthenwares quite rough parts and suddenly you see something which is thin as paper white shiny translucent and you wonder what on earth this magic substance is in fact early europeans didn't know what porcelain was they thought it was some kind of precious stone porcelain was harder than our toughest stonewares if you hit it with a spoon it rang like a bell but it didn't flake chip or scratch it was resistant to heat and the color didn't fade it was very hard it was white and when you held it up to the light you could see it was translucent better still it came from far off china and only the chinese knew how to make it all over europe scientific gentlemen experimented in vain to try to work out what made porcelain so fine collectors were obsessed there was a fortune to be made the swank value of porcelain was quite high in fact in many cases porcelain even replaced precious metals like gold and silver a beautiful exotic hard to get product in limited supply the portuguese and dutch have been first to the source so the british aristocracy had to beg borrow or steal it in 1602 they did just that when a portuguese boat loaded with porcelain was stolen by the dutch in mid-ocean it came up for auction the kings of france and england bid against each other these are very exclusive very high status luxury items for the mega ridge the person who really kicks it all off in england is queen mary ii in the late 17th century now she had spent time in the low countries the dutch are a great trading nation she got hold of loads loads of porcelain when she'd been living over there before she came to england and you can really see in the royal collection charles the first he has some porcelain he has about 60 items mary the second 50 years later she's got 800. what had begun in the 16th and 17th century since the importation of occasional pieces of blue and white porcelain for princes and their palaces became in the 18th century the melody the porcelain the porcelain sickness when every self-respecting merchant and his household filled every look in the cranny every shelf with chinese porcelain today we tend to eat off plain white plates but generations of british homemakers have jollied up their interiors with blue and white china the idea that utilitarian objects could also be works of art was revolutionary and would be a profound influence on our aesthetics to many however this was just an opportunity for conspicuous consumption one of the best descriptions of china mania comes from daniel defoe and he's writing in the early 18th century he says that you need to put it on your tables you need to put it on your writing table it's on your cabinet it's right up to the top of the ceiling it's being displayed on these shelves in people's houses and people are so mad for it that they're getting into debt they're going bust they're wasting their family's wealth the world had gone mad for china so how did this rare product available only to the few become a craze amongst the emerging middle class it was thanks to the business savvy of the most powerful corporation the world has ever seen the east india company this indie company i think we can look at as being the mother of the modern corporation it exists in import export business exporting bullion to asia to bring in luxury goods spices textiles and tea and porcelain from china from leaden hall street in the city of london the company controlled the supply and fed the demand for porcelain because they had a monopoly on all british trade with the east today there isn't so much as a brass plaque to mark the place where their mansion offices stood another monument to global trade now occupies the plot lloyds of london at its height it had a very grand classical uh headquarters um perhaps something like the the british museum in terms of its sort of style sort of with the classical frontage a very very big uh building with its own museum inside and also it's auction house where every quarter there would be the the sale of all the goods which are supposed to be so so now loud and noisy that people could hear them outside and they'd be that's shouting and yelling as people tried to to to get their price for the the goods the corporation docks were at black wall they had chandler's sail lofts mast houses careening beds and an army of stevedores toting bales of cotton silks spices tea and of course porcelain by the hundredweight it was from here that the company ships known as east indiamen sailed out to find the trade winds these breezes are a meteorological conveyor belt they took the ships down the coast of africa around the horn out across the indian ocean through the malacca straits and into the south china seas where hordes of pirates lay in wait for the china trade these were the biggest ships these were the one thousand one thousand two hundred ton ships both having obviously commercial purpose but also able to fight off marauders and pirates there are huge dangers of dying i mean two about a half two thirds of people never came back for those who made it the port of entry was guangzhou or canton and it's where my chinese journey begins today china is a holiday destination then it was as alien as the moon except we knew what the moon looked like welcome to china if you'd come here in the 18th century the scene out there in the dusk would have been one of a flotilla of european ships all bobbing at anchor their lights twinkling occasional sounds of sailors singing these were the sailors who'd come halfway across the world in their minds the celestial empire has portrayed in blue and white china a land of romance and what happened they got to here known to the european sailor says the juanpoa anchorage and this was where they had to stop the emperor in far away beijing was not minded to allow traders to penetrate further than his southern doorstep they were confined to canton and even then only the port area there was a view that many of the the europeans and so on were little more than pirates and were to be discouraged because of the disruption they could cause there were two very good reasons for keeping the foreigners here in canton the first was to prevent the barbarian influence on the chinese empire the second more importantly was to prevent china's own secrets from leaking out into the west and one of these secrets of course was the method of making porcelain the europeans were confined to port and their orders for tea sets and dinner services were taken up country by chinese middlemen known to europeans as hoppos even in modern times it's been difficult for foreigners to get permits to visit certain areas but today i can go to the place where all porcelain came from the fabled town of jindergen 18th century accounts tell of a warren of streets and alleyways and a population that consumed ten thousand loads of rice and one thousand hogs every day it's in the middle of nowhere and very difficult to get to the reason the town it makes all this porcelain is because of its fantastic natural resources the materials at jinderjen are particularly rich and so that's why it was given an imperial decree in the year 1004. remote and inaccessible the town was literally built on the secret ingredients that made porcelain what happened in jingdujan is that until the early 10th century it was making a stoneware material that had a grey green ash glaze and this had really been made in south china since the bronze age what seems to have happened in the 10th century a.d is that chinese potters discovered that there was another local rock and if they processed this in exactly the same way they could produce um a white material rather than this old grey-green stoneware the rock they discovered was mined in the hills above the town every day for a thousand years these paths were trodden by laborers ferrying basketballs down the slopes and the product they were carrying an essential ingredient in 99 percent of the pieces of porcelain we find in european country houses is named after this mountain mount gerlin and the material we call kaolin oh gosh from sub-tropical to sub-zero it's very cold in here and to think that every day these men from the village below came a thousand feet up the hill into holes like this quarrying for kaolin buckled under the weight as they carried it back down again and the fact that these workmen probably didn't live that long

Channel: Art Documentaries

Views: 690,904

Rating: 4.8555131 out of 5

Keywords: Chinese Ceramics, Chinese Porcelain

Id: 9YNDe5WbdbQ

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 05 2013