Long before there was China, there were Chinese ceramics.
Chinese ceramics before China? Hear me out, but let’s first look.
Do any of these things just feel Chinese? Don’t answer! You already know.
We’re just getting started, starting with the end of the beginning, and you already know. You already know the “type” of ceramics that introduced East to West, the blue and white Ming Dynasty exports:
Beautiful blues under a clear glaze on white porcelain: these were the West’s beginning to Chinese ceramics. It’s probably when the word inscrutable first came to mind. Fair; what the West couldn’t see was that this journey to the West had a many thousand-year prequel.
Before the blue and whites, were the whites. Above are peak technology but mass produced high-fired thin bodied ‘porcelaneous’ stoneware. There were steady improvements in clay handling, kiln technology and glaze science leading up to making these at scale for domestic use and SE Asia export.
These aren’t even Chinese, or very old. They’re just beautiful, and Japanese. Many of the best Chinese ceramics are Japanese. See it yet? You’re better at this than you thought.
Do these three look Chinese? Yes and No are both correct. The clay, shapes, glazes and enamels were China’s world-leading tech, but they took feedback from target markets for custom design.
To conclude, let’s now start at the beginning. The Chinese ceramics before China…
When hunter-gathers of the Yellow River Valley started gathering themselves into bigger groups, they formed the first year-round communities. This gave them time to hunt for new things, like clays to shape, and better ways to control fire, and find colors that would stick.
Fired at low temperature and unglazed, early Chinese earthenware isn’t watertight but does feel like terra cotta. Pigments didn’t survive firing and were applied afterwards or ‘cold painted’. The crux of the entire history of Chinese ceramics? Fixing all that. Figuring out how to fully vitrify the ceramics while hitting the right temps and formulas to vitrify the coolest designs they could think of.
That’s also Japanese, but with Chinese te
