This 1739-42 plate comes from a set made for a wealthy English family. It is considered one of the most elaborately export porcelain ever made.

A pair of dogs, possibly Tibetan Mastiffs

This white-on-white teapot was decorated and overglazed in England

Long before present-day China emerged, in the 11^th and 12^th centuries during the Sung era, pottery and porcelain items were exported to what is now Indonesia, other South-East Asian states, and the Philippines. After the Mongol conquest, inspired by this foreign influence, potters adjusted themselves to produce wares for an ever increasing market. This included Persia and the Middle East to where porcelain wares traveled via the 'Silk Road', across mountains and deserts.

Europe came to this export market relatively late, well after the Venetian Marco Polo had begun his travels to China with his father and uncle in 1271. The merchants finally arrived there in 1275. It took the Polos 20 years to arrive back in Venice. Four years later, in 1299, while being held a prisoner in Genoa, Marco dictated what became perhaps the most famous and influential travel book in European history. He also coined the term porcelain. To describe what he had seen he used the Italian word porcellana, which comes from porcella, the diminutive of porca (sow). The word originally described the oval-shaped, bright, glassy appearance of cowrie shells used as currency in parts of Asia, India and Africa, and then Polo used it to describe the look of Chinese ceramic ware which in his time time was unknown in Europe.

Every major society has produced a form of pottery or ceramics that has its own charm. But what the world wanted from China was the then unique porcelain that only the Chinese produced. They had discovered kaolin (China clay) during the Tang dynasty (618-906) and, more importantly, they noted that when mixed with China stone, a feldspathic rock, and fired at the right high temperature, it became vitrified (glasslike) and hence, translucent.

It took Europeans until the early 16^th century to begin trading with China. It started with the Portuguese, who sailed to India in 1498, after rounding the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa in 1497. The Cape, also known as the Cape of Storms, has claimed many ships and lives over the centuries, and even today is a hazard to shipping. Its rounding by Vasco da Gama in 1497 proved a major physical and psychological breakthrough in the history of shipping, although he was not the first to do so. His predecessor, Bartholomeu Dias, had first rounded Cape of Good Hope in 1488, but journeyed only to the Fish River that flows into the Indian Ocean from Eastern Cape province of present-day South Africa. But his journey revealed that India could be reached by sea, thus avoiding travel along the torturous land route of the Silk Road.

Once da Gama had traveled to India, the Portuguese ventured further East and began a trade with the Chinese in 1517. This led to the establishment of a permanent trading settlement on the island of Macao in 1557. The original intension of the Portuguese had been to find a water route to the East to obtain spices, but porcelain soon became another commodity. By 1580 Lisbon boasted several shops that sold "extremely fine porcelain of varied shapes." The fashion of having European designs placed on porcelain also originated with the Portuguese, who ordered pieces showing the Portuguese royal arms and emblems of Catholic monastic orders.

Spain soon came into the picture, and the Portuguese monopoly ended when the former annexed the latter. Because of the political tension between Spain and the Netherlands, Portuguese ports closed to Dutch trade in 1595. Consequently, the Dutch began to trade directly with China. They set up a major trading post in Batavia (modern-day Jakarta on the Indonesian island of Java), and soon wrested control of the China trade from both Portugal and Spain, and then even dominated the inter-Asian trade.

The Dutch were the first to bring porcelain in large quantities to Europe, and they were the ones who also ordered not just Chinese wares featuring European designs, but also asked the Chinese to produce for them items that were of practical use to the European customers, such as saltcellars, butter dishes and mustard pots that had no equal in China. Soon fanciful soup tureens, and other serving dishes were added. When tea, and then coffee, became more popular in Europe, tea and coffee pots joined other household items.

The English also began to trade with China during the 1600s, and became large importers of porcelain goods. Other European nations followed, although none were as successful in their trade with China as the Dutch and English. The Americans joined in the trade in 1784, shortly after the ratification of the Treaty of Paris that had ended the American Revolution.

At first European ships entered Chinese ports without difficulty. In 1729, however, the Chinese became wary of Western influence on their culture and restricted entry to Macao. From there, Chinese pilots took the ocean going vessels as far up Whampoa. At this port, a ship's supercargo, the contingent of merchants and their cargo were transferred to Chinese junks that then ferried them the final 12 miles (about 19 km) to Canton (modern Guangzhou) where each country had its own trading post called a 'hong' that invariably included housing, warehousing and even factories. There the Europeans were literally prisoners on the small strip of land because very few ever received permission to go inside China.

Export porcelain was produced in two places: Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province in south-central China, and Dehua, in the southern province of Fujian. The vast majority of items, which were heavily decorated, came from Jingdezhen, while Dehua produced what is known as blanc-de-chin porcelain. This porcelain has a dense, highly translucent body and soft, milky white glaze. Both places still produce porcelain, some in large factories with modern methods, while there are also small, private kilns using ancient methods. Dehua's kilns now concentrate exclusively on figurines and figure groups.

The Japanese also produced porcelain for export and traded with Europe. Eventually, however, cheaper Chinese products edged the Japanese out of the mass export market. It seems that in some ways history has repeated itself here.

The craze for Chinese porcelain eventually waned when kaolin was discovered in Germany, where Augustus II of Saxony encouraged research into finding 'white gold'. He employed an alchemist, Johann Friedrich Böttger, from whom he actually wanted a formula for 'Alltinktur', a mixture that would produce a cure for all illnesses. Augustus also wanted real gold. Böttger, however, working with a gentleman by the name of von Tschirnau, finally came up with a way to create porcelain, which many called 'white gold'. This assuaged Augustus's desire for gold and the tincture. Von Tschirnau died before the final porcelain formula was worked out, but although Böttger is generally credited with the discovery, he could not have done so without the help from von Tschirnau. The end result was the famous Meissen porcelain factories. While this European breakthrough led to the eventual decline of a desire for Chinese wares, it did not free Augustus from his addiction to collecting Chinese wares. He owned about 24,000 pieces, which inspired him to carry out a renovation of a palace to house them.

The Chinese had been producing porcelain for about a thousand years before Europeans came to see the first real piece of what we now often simply call 'China'. During this time they had developed methods of mass production that preceded Henry Ford's assembly line production of cars. A description of the process has come down to us from a Jesuit missionary, Père d'Entrecolles. He toured Jingdezhen in 1712 and 1722. "A Piece of China-ware, after it is baked, has passed the hands of seventy Workmen," he wrote. Each person painted only one particular stroke or object on the piece and then passed it to the next person. These workers never saw the final product. This process did not change much over the centuries and in the 1820s some watercolor paintings were produced that showed the manufacture of porcelain in China, starting with the digging for clay and ending with the packing of the finished product.

These watercolors are part of the exhibition at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, as are some paintings from around 1805 that offer a view of the ports of Macao, Boca Tigris, Whampoa and Canton. These pictorial images add much to the excellent display of Chinese export porcelain in its many variations. The exhibition shows that the tastes of the aristocracy, and the wealthy of lower rank in the 17^th and 18^th centuries leaned toward excess in decoration. It is, of course, a matter of personal taste, but many of the pieces would not fit well into present-day homes. Hence, what had once been utilitarian objects, today can be seen only as well-placed accents in a room.

Pounding clay

Firing porcelain in a kiln