When was porcelain invented

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Related Articles Open Post. Open Post. De Waal is a master of telling stories through material objects. He can see a vase and not only imagine the kind of room it once inhabited but the type of woman who might have brushed her fingertips across its lip. When he writes about porcelain, you immediately understand that this is material made for a perfectionist:. Pinch a walnut-sized piece between thumb and forefingers until it is as thin as paper until the whorls of your fingers emerge.

Keep pinching. It feels endless. You feel it will get thinner and thinner until it is as thin as a gold leaf and lifts into the air. And it feels clean. Your hands feel cleaner after you have used it. It feels white. Working in porcelain takes patience as well as skill. The smallest amount of water can change its texture. But this risk of failure is worth the outcome of success: if made correctly, there is nothing thinner, no other clay that possesses that luminosity, that unbelievable strength.

Tap a finished bowl with your spoon, and it rings hollow, like a metal cup. Glass shatters, earthenware crumbles; porcelain is otherworldly in its beauty and strength. De Waal understands what drives a person to try to make porcelain for half his life, why emperors craved it, and why kings demanded it. It also holds glaze in a very different way and can look quite ethereal. Given that it is also the hardest of the ceramic wares , it is also commonly used for laboratory equipment and for electric insulation.

Porcelain is also used for porcelain enamel for home items such as a bathtub. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. The Ming Dynasty rulers prefered Dehua porcelain of Fujian Province for ritualistic and religious uses. A dynastic law specified that idols and ritualistic objects used in shrines and temples should be made of white porcelain.

The Ming people preferred the the distinctive warm ivory-white porcelain that the Dehua area produced. The ivory color is produced because the clay there contains a trace of iron. Dehua is near Quanzhou that had long been a principal port, and the area's seafaring merchants helped to bring Dehua porcelain to Europe where the French called it "blanc de Chine.

About the year , some Dutch people captured Portuguese cargo ships bearing thousands of pieces of Ming porcelain. These were auctioned, and this ignited a porcelain mania in Europe. Pieces of porcelain were sold at such high prices that porcelain was known as "white gold. The Manchu conquest of the Ming Dynasty and continuing wars along the coast temporarily disrupted porcelain production and export.

But Emperor Kangxi reorganized the production at Jingdezhen and the dynasty's export trade. His court administration carefully supervised the imperial porcelain factory at Jingdezhen. During his reign, personalized or specially ordered porcelain art became popular in America and Europe. Rulers, rich people, and merchants sent portraits, designs, coats of arms, statues, and articles to the Qing merchants that they wanted reproduced.

The finished articles were prized. Chinese porcelain was highly prized in the West and in the Islamic World even after Europeans found out how to replicate it themselves in the s. The artwork was exotic, the colors were bright and beautiful, the artistic pieces were durable and useful, and the pieces were comparatively inexpensive. After the middle s, the Europeans had learned to make good quality porcelain, but the porcelain of Jingdezhen was still appreciated for its high quality and relatively lower cost until the end of the Qing Dynasty and for a few years afterwards.

In , a Jesuit who visited Jingdezhen sent a letter that explained how to make it. This letter was widely read and aided porcelain production in Europe. However, Jingdezhen was a huge porcelain production center, and the price of labor was lower there than in Europe. Eventually, the technology of porcelain production spread to other areas of East Asia. It is thought that Koreans first started to make porcelain ceramics during the time of the Song Dynasty —