Blue-and-white

Blue-and-white porcelain was produced in the Jingdezhen kilns in China, and seems to have been made largely for export until the later fifteenth century.Gauvin A Bailey, ‘The Stimulus: Chinese Porcelain Production and Trade with Iran’, Tamerlane’s Tableware: A New Approach to the Chinoiserie Ceramics of Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Iran, ed. Lisa Golombek, Robert B Mason, and Gauvin A Bailey (Toronto, 1996), p. 7. However, this technique is itself the product of intercultural exchanges.

Chemical analysis has shown that the ore for making the cobalt blue pigment used at the Jingdezhen kilns in the Ming period originated in the village of Qamsar in Kashan in Iran, and it may have been Muslim merchants living in Quanzhou who introduced the use of this blue on porcelain.

Despite the origins of pigment and aesthetic in Islamic West Asia, Jingdezhen became the dominant producer of blue-and-white porcelain. This is in part due to its location, with ready access to pure kaolin and good trade links, but also to the techniques developed there. The viscosity of their colorless glaze meant that there was less diffusion of pigment during firing, which preserved the intricacy of more delicate designs. They were also able to fire blue-and-white with great precision, creating less waste. Jingdezhen’s growth was also due in part to the Muslim merchants, who invested the capital to transform the kilns into the large commercial production centre they became.Robert Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History', Journal of World History, 9:2 (1998), p. 155.

The blue-and-white style itself tells the story of multiple journeys and interchanges between China and Persia in this period.