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The history of blue and white porcelain

Posted 28/7/2017

Blue and white decoration first became widely used in Chinese porcelain in the 14th century, after the cobalt pigment for the blue began to be imported from Persia. However, the origin of this decorative style is thought to lie in Iraq, when craftsmen in Basra sought to imitate imported white Chinese stoneware with their own tin-glazed, white pottery and added decorative motifs in blue glazes that had been developed by preexisting Mesopotamian cultures. 

Such Abbasid-era "blue and white" pieces have been found in present-day Iraq dating to the 9th century A.D., decades after the opening of a direct sea route from Iraq to China. Later, in China, a style of decoration based on sinuous plant forms spreading across the object was perfected and most commonly used. It was widely exported, and inspired imitative wares in Islamic ceramics and later European tin-glazed earthenware such as Delftware and after the techniques were discovered in the 18th century, European porcelain. Blue and white pottery in all of these traditions continues to be produced, most of it copying earlier styles.

Blue glazes were first developed by ancient Mesopotamians to imitate lapis lazuli, which was a highly prized stone. Later, a cobalt blue glaze became popular in Islamic pottery during the Abbasid Caliphate, during which time the cobalt was mined near Kashan, Oman, and Northern Hejaz.

Tang and Song blue-and-white.

The first Chinese blue and white wares were produced as early as the ninth century in Henan province, China during the Tang Dynasty, although only shards have been discovered.Tang period blue-and-white is more rare than Song blue-and-white and was unknown before 1985.The Tang pieces are not porcelain however, but rather earthenwares with greenish white slip, using cobalt blue pigments.The only three pieces of complete "Tang blue and white" in the world were recovered from Indonesian Belitung shipwreck in 1998 and later sold to Singapore.It appears that the technique was thereafter forgotten for some centuries.
In the early 20th century, the development of the classic blue and white Jingdezhen ware porcelain was dated to the early Ming period, but consensus now agrees that these wares began to be made around 1300-1320, and were fully developed by the mid-century, as shown by the David Vases dated 1351, which are cornerstones for this chronology. There are still those arguing that early pieces are mis-dated, and in fact go back to the Southern Song, but most scholars continue to reject this view.

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