Chinese Porcelain: From Tang Sancai to Ming Blue-and-White to Qing Famille Rose
Chinese porcelain (瓷器, cíqì) is the most famous Chinese contribution to world material culture, and the single most important Chinese export for most of the imperial period. The Western word china — meaning porcelain — is itself a testament to the fact that the European market identified fine ceramics with China. This article traces the development of Chinese porcelain from the Tang sancai wares of the seventh to ninth centuries, through the celebrated Song monochrome wares, the imperial kilns of the Ming, and the elaborate Qing famille rose and famille verte enamelled wares. For a broader look at the visual arts of imperial China, see the survey of Chinese visual arts, and for an introduction to the parallel art of writing with the brush, see our survey of Chinese calligraphy. Porcelain sits within the broader Chinese art, culture, and society of the imperial period.
The Pre-Porcelain Wares: Tang Sancai
The first great age of Chinese ceramic art was the Tang dynasty (618–907). The most famous Tang ceramic ware is sancai (三彩, “three colours”), a kind of lead-glazed earthenware decorated with three principal colours: green, amber, and a creamy white. The wares were mostly made for tomb use, and the most famous surviving examples are the bold ceramic horses, camels, and human figures that have been excavated from Tang tombs since the early twentieth century. The sancai horses and camels of the Tang are life-size or larger, glazed in rich earth tones, and full of energy. Tang sancai was also exported across the Silk Road, and Tang ceramics have been found as far west as Samarkand, Baghdad, and the Persian Gulf.
The Song Monochrome Wares
The Song dynasty (960–1279) is the great age of Chinese ceramics. The Song refined the high-fired stoneware and porcelain tradition to a level that has never been surpassed. The Song also saw the development of the five great kilns (五大名窯, wǔ dà míng yáo) of the Northern Song: Ru, Guan, Ge, Jun, and Ding. Each was prized for its distinctive aesthetic.
The Five Great Kilns
The Ru wares (汝窯) of the late Northern Song are among the rarest and most prized of all Chinese ceramics. Only about 90 authentic pieces survive, mostly in museums in Beijing, Taipei, and London. The Ru glaze is a pale celadon, almost the colour of the sky after rain, with fine crackle. The Guan wares (官窯) of the Southern Song are a similar pale celadon with more pronounced crackle. The Ge wares (哥窯) are similar but with an even more pronounced crackle, with “gold thread” and “iron wire” crackle patterns of great beauty. The Jun wares (鈞窯) of Henan are famous for their rich, opalescent glazes in blues, lavenders, and crimsons. The Ding wares (定窯) of Hebei are white or ivory-toned porcelains, often with carved decoration and a characteristic “tearmark” rim.
Celadon Wares
Celadon — a term for wares with a jade-green glaze produced by iron oxide in a reducing atmosphere — was the most widespread of the Song monochrome traditions. The great celadon kilns of the Southern Song and Yuan were at Longquan (龍泉) in Zhejiang. Longquan celadon was exported in huge quantities across Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and Africa, and a Japanese tradition of celadon-inspired stoneware eventually developed at sites like Seto in response to the Chinese imports.
Jian and Tea Wares
The Jian (建) wares of Fujian produced the dark, iron-rich tea bowls prized by Song tea connoisseurs. The famous “hare’s fur” and “oil spot” glazes of Jian tea bowls were the perfect complement to the whipped-powder tea of the Song, where the white froth of the tea would contrast dramatically with the dark bowl. Jian tea bowls were also exported to Japan, where they became prized as the ideal tea bowls for the Japanese tea ceremony.
The Imperial Kilns of the Ming
The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) saw the rise of the imperial porcelain industry at Jingdezhen (景德鎮) in Jiangxi province. Jingdezhen had been an important ceramic centre since the Tang, but it was under the Ming that it became the undisputed porcelain capital of the world. The Ming established an official imperial kiln complex at Jingdezhen, supervised by court officials, that produced porcelain for the imperial household and the tribute system.
Blue-and-White
The single most famous Ming ceramic is the blue-and-white (青花, qīnghuā) porcelain, decorated with cobalt-blue underglaze painting on a white porcelain body. The early Ming, especially the Xuande (1426–1435) and Chenghua (1465–1487) reigns, produced some of the most refined blue-and-white porcelain ever made, with dense, all-over decoration of dragons, lotuses, and arabesques, or with sparse compositions of plum blossoms, bamboo, and birds.
Ming Wucai and Doucai
The late Ming, especially the Jiajing (1522–1566) and Wanli (1573–1620) reigns, saw the development of the wucai (五彩, “five colours”) wares, decorated with underglaze blue combined with overglaze enamels in red, green, yellow, and aubergine. The Jiajing emperor was an obsessive Daoist, and many wucai wares of his reign are decorated with Daoist immortals, cranes, and the Eight Immortals. The doucai (鬥彩, “joined colours”) technique, in which the underglaze blue outlines are filled in with overglaze enamels, produced some of the most exquisite of all Ming porcelains.
The Qing Imperial Wares
The Qing dynasty (1644–1912) inherited and expanded the Jingdezhen tradition. The three great early-Qing emperors — the Kangxi (r. 1661–1722), Yongzheng (r. 1722–1735), and Qianlong (r. 1735–1796) — presided over the technical and aesthetic peak of Chinese porcelain. The Qing court demanded the most elaborate and refined wares ever made, and the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen produced them in astonishing quantity.
Famille Verte and Famille Rose
The two great Qing decorative styles are famille verte (literally “green family”) and famille rose (literally “pink family”), terms coined by the French collector Albert Jacquemart in the nineteenth century. Famille verte wares, popular in the Kangxi reign, used an overglaze enamel palette dominated by greens, with reds, yellows, and blues. Famille rose wares, which developed fully in the Yongzheng reign, introduced a new opaque pink enamel made from colloidal gold, which gave the wares their soft, pearly appearance. Famille rose was used for some of the most elaborate Qing imperial porcelains, including the famous “fencai” (粉彩, “powder colours”) wares, decorated with painted flowers, birds, and women in gardens.
Monochromes and Technical Masterpieces
The Qing also produced exquisite monochromes: the deep ox-blood sang de boeuf (郎紅, lánghóng) of the Kangxi reign; the pale celadon of the Longquan tradition; the brilliant imperial yellow glaze; the clair de lune (月白, yuèbái) pale blue; and the mottled “kiln-transmuted” glazes of the Jun tradition. The Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns also saw the production of elaborate technical masterpieces: vases painted to look like paintings, and wares with engraved and openwork decoration.
The Global Demand for Chinese Porcelain
Chinese porcelain was, along with silk and tea, one of the three great Chinese exports across the imperial period. From the Tang onwards, Chinese ceramics were prized across Asia, the Middle East, and (after the late medieval period) Europe. The Maritime Silk Road carried Chinese porcelain from ports like Quanzhou and Guangzhou to Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, and East Africa, where Chinese celadon, blue-and-white, and other wares have been excavated in great quantities.
The arrival of European trading ships in the sixteenth century turned porcelain into a major item of global trade. The Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, the French, the Swedish, and the Danish all competed for the Chinese market, and the great porcelain services produced for the export trade became prized possessions in European aristocratic households. The demand for Chinese porcelain was so great that it eventually inspired European imitations, first at Meissen in Germany in the early eighteenth century and then across Europe, giving rise to the great European porcelain tradition. The Chinese export trade declined in the nineteenth century, but the legacy of Chinese porcelain — in design, in technique, and in the fact that the word china is the English word for porcelain — remains.