Copyright Trustees of the British Museum
Extracts from the transcript from the BBC Radio 4 series The History of the World in 100 Objects
Episode 64 - The David Vases
The David Vases (made in 1351). Porcelain; from China
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea."
The thrilling opening lines of Coleridge's opium-fuelled fantasy
still send a tingle down the spine. As a teenager I was mesmerised by
this vision of exotic and mysterious pleasures, but I'd no idea that
Coleridge was in fact writing about a historical figure. Because
Qubilai Khan is a thirteenth-century Chinese emperor and Xanadu merely
the English form of Shangdu, his Imperial summer capital. Qubilai Khan
was the grandson of Genghis Khan, ruler of the Mongols from 1206 and
terror of the world. Wreaking havoc everywhere, Genghis Khan
established the Mongol Empire - a superpower that ran from the Black Sea
to the Sea of Japan and from Cambodia to the Arctic. Qubilai Khan, his
grandson, extended the Empire and became Emperor of China, which leads
us to the objects for this programme.
Under the Mongol emperors, China developed one of the most enduring
and successful luxury products in the history of the world, a product
fit for stately pleasure-domes, but which spread in a matter of
centuries from grand palaces to simple parlours all over the world...
it's Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. We now think of blue-and-white
as quintessentially Chinese, but as we shall discover, this is not how
it began. This archetypal Chinese aesthetic comes in fact from Iran.
The importance of Chinese porcelain is hard to over-estimate.
Admired and imitated for over a thousand years, it's influenced
virtually every ceramic tradition in the world, and it's played a star
role in cross-cultural exchanges. In Europe, blue-and-white porcelain
is practically synonymous with China. And we've always associated it
with the Ming Dynasty. But it was the David Vases, now in the British
Museum, that made us re-think this history, for they predate the Ming
and were in fact made under Qubilai Khan's Mongol Dynasty, known as the
Yuan, who controlled all of China until the middle of the fourteenth
century.
Seven hundred years ago most of Asia and a large part of Europe were
reeling from the invasions of the Mongols. We all know Genghis Khan as
the ultimate destroyer and the sack of Baghdad by his son still lives in
Iraqi folk memory. Genghis's grandson Qubilai was also a great
warrior, but under him Mongol rule became more settled and more ordered.
As Emperor of China, he supported scholarship and the arts, and he
encouraged the manufacture of luxury goods. Once the Empire was
established, a 'Pax Mongolica' ensued, a Mongolian peace which, like the
Pax Romana, ensured a long period of stability and prosperity. The
Mongol Empire spread along the ancient Silk Road and made it safe. It
was thanks to this Pax Mongolica that Marco Polo was able to travel from
Italy to China, and then return to tell Europe what he'd seen. And one
of the startling things he'd seen was porcelain.
The David Vases are so-called because they were bought by Sir
Percival David, whose collection of over one and a half thousand Chinese
ceramics is now in a special gallery at the British Museum. ... These two
vases are obviously luxury porcelain production, made by
artist-craftsmen delighting in their material.
Porcelain is a special ceramic fired at very high temperature:
1200-1400 degrees centigrade. The heat vitrifies the clay, so that like
glass it can hold liquid, in contrast to porous earthenware. And the
heat also makes it very tough. White, hard and translucent, porcelain
was admired and desired everywhere, well before the creation of
blue-and-white.
The very word 'porcelain' comes to us from Marco Polo's description
of his travels in Qubilai Khan's China. The Italian 'porcellana',
'little piglet', is a slang word for cowrie shells. They do indeed look
a little like curled-up piglets. And the only thing that Marco Polo
could think of, to give his readers an idea of the shell-like sheen of
the hard, fine ceramics that he saw in China, was a cowrie shell, a
'porcellana'. And so 'little piglets', porcelain, we've called it ever
since - that's if we're not just calling it china. I don't think
there's another country in the world whose name has simply become
interchangeable with its defining export.
The savagery of the Mongol invasion destabilised and destroyed local
pottery industries across the Middle East, especially in Iran. So when
peace returned, these became major markets for Chinese exports. And in
these new markets blue-and-white ware had long been popular. So the
porcelain the Chinese made for them mirrored the local style, and
Chinese potters used the Iranian blue pigment, cobalt, to meet local
taste. The cobalt from Iran was known in China as 'huihui qing' -
'Muslim blue' - clear evidence that the blue-and-white tradition is
Middle Eastern and not Chinese. Here's Craig Clunas, an expert on
Chinese cultural history:
"Iran, and what's now Iraq, are the kind of areas where this sort of
colouring comes in. This is a technique that comes from elsewhere, and
therefore it tells us something about this period, when China is
unprecedentedly open to the rest of Asia as part of this huge empire of
the Mongols, which stretches all the way from the Pacific almost to the
Mediterranean. Certainly the openness to the rest of Asia is what
brings about things like blue-and-white, and it probably had an impact
on forms of literature. So from the point of view of cultural forms
coming into being, the Yuan period is extraordinarily important."
We're told that the vases were
purpose-made to be offered as donations at a temple, and that the name
of their donor is Zhang Wenjin, who describes himself with great
solemnity as a disciple of the holy gods. It gives his home town,
Shuncheng in what is now Jiangxi province, a few hundred miles
south-west of Shanghai. He was offering these two grand vases along
with an incense-burner - the three would have formed a typical set for
an altar. The incense-burner has been lost, or at least has not yet
been found. ...
Foreign rulers, the Mongols; foreign materials, Muslim blue; and
foreign markets, Iran and Iraq; all played an essential part in the
creation of what to many outside China is still the most Chinese of
objects, blue-and-white porcelain. Soon these ceramics were being
exported from China in very large quantities, to Japan and south-east
Asia, across the Indian Ocean to Africa and the Middle East. And far
beyond that. Here's author Jenny Uglow:
"Then it comes to Europe, and the Dutch adapt it to their life, and
so it comes to Britain, and we adapt it to the forms of jugs we like,
the plates we love, and so on. It becomes translated, it's like a
wonderful language which is perpetually translated to the culture where
it's arriving and is loved. People say it's a very, sort of, elemental
thing: it's blue and white, it's the blue sky and the white clouds, or
the blue sea and the white sand. And behavioral psychologists who've
looked at the way people react to colour say that blue and white is seen
as immensely serene and relaxing. But I think also it has to do with
the great long history - you know, a thousand years of history - and the
way that the blue-and-white designs themselves seem to be mysterious
and 'other' and have their own stories as well. It's a combination of
colour appeal and historical appeal."
So, eventually, centuries after its creation in Muslim Iran, and its
transformation in Mongol China, blue-and-white arrived in Europe and
triumphed. Willow-pattern, the style that many people think of when
blue-and-white is mentioned, was invented in England in the 1790s by
Thomas Minton, and it was as much a fantasy view of China as Coleridge's
poem. It was an instant success, and Coleridge may indeed even have
been drinking his tea out of a willow-pattern cup as he emerged from his
opium dream.
Blue-and-white porcelain was the first truly global luxury product,
and one that could be infinitely adapted to suit all local tastes. The
David Vases, the earliest dateable blue-and-white, were made as
offerings to the gods; in the next programme we're with another
high-status object, also used as a means of connecting with the
supernatural... it's a ritual throne from the Caribbean.
