History and Distribution: An Overview

Looking now specifically at abundance, with reference to the underlying principle of this concept—that is, objects in quantity—for the purposes of this chapter Chinese porcelain from Jingdezhen will be defined in terms of quantity in four main areas: production, consumption, decoration, and distribution. In their original context, these porcelains were industrial products. While today single examples of Chinese porcelain are treated as individual works of art, for most of China’s history this type of object was representative of mass production and standardization at both the high and low ends of the quality scale. It was not in any way “art pottery.” The main production sites were located in south China, where beginning in about AD 1000 porcelains were (and still are) made in vast quantities at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province for domestic and foreign consumption, using large quantities of raw materials, labor, and energy.

In pre–twentieth-century China, porcelains were not used singularly or interpreted as singular items, apart from special commissions or a few rare examples that had become antiques, thus entering another category of object. At the imperial level, evidence of high-end production is visibly abundant in the huge sherd heap remains at the sites of the imperial kilns, also located at Jingdezhen from the early Ming dynasty (1368–1644). These same sherd heaps further demonstrate an abundance of waste and destruction, both intentional and consequential. For the imperial factories, numerous textual records survive from the late sixteenth century that attest to vast court orders of porcelains for specific occasions, which can often be matched to existing pieces or discarded ones at the kiln sites. In terms of aesthetics, the decoration of porcelain from both the imperial and commercial kilns indicates a cultural desire for representations of abundance through the often dense and repetitive decoration (or even the word for abundance, 富, used iconographically) that can be seen on Chinese ceramics from the fourteenth century onward.

Outside China, the development of official maritime trade from as early as the seventh century in the Tang dynasty (AD 618–906) ensured that foreign consumers could acquire large quantities of Chinese goods, including porcelain (from north China at this time), and use them in quantity. Accumulations in the Middle East and Japan from this time and later and in Europe after 1600 attest to this. The aesthetics of abundant decoration and an associated desire to display Chinese porcelain seem also to have transferred to other cultures through imitation and accumulation, demonstrating another impact of abundant porcelain. Through its appropriation in foreign cultures, most often in quantity, Chinese porcelain could take on new, locally conceived meanings (Pierson 2012).

The maritime and overland trade that distributed Chinese porcelain operated on an economic principle of abundance through economies of scale and profitability, thus providing us today with visual evidence of large-scale shipments of porcelain in the wrecked hulls of ships found worldwide and quantities of sherds found at trading ports (see Kerr 2008 for a recent overview). The function of these porcelains in trade and the vast quantities recorded in wrecks and shipping records point to abundance as a precondition for utility in this context.

Abundance is therefore an important framework for understanding key features of both the character and impact of Chinese porcelain, domestically and overseas. Through this lens, we can situate Chinese porcelain in wider discussions about material goods and global consumption. With a view to exploring this new way of looking at Chinese porcelain from Jingdezhen, this chapter considers manifestations of abundance in porcelains from three time periods and contexts: a Yuan dynasty dish, the Ming imperial factory, and a Qing dynasty shipwreck. As case studies, these examples will help illuminate both the principles of abundance as they apply to Chinese objects and the material evidence for abundance in the distribution sphere of Chinese porcelain.

A Yuan Dynasty Dish

If we consider abundance first as an economic principle with reference to objects in general, then design in terms of both formal and visual features has to be seen as part of this. Design involves a number of choices based on known variables, with the economics of production, distribution, and sale as primary factors in addition to aesthetics. Too often, design with reference to material objects tends to be analyzed through an art historical framework such that forms, visual motifs, and their arrangement are situated within a known or comparative stylistic category. In Chinese ceramic studies, for example, dishes like the one illustrated in figure 11.1 are usually classified according to several features said to be indicative of or defining style: date (Yuan dynasty, fourteenth century), color (blue and white), decoration (usually described as “Islamic”),¹ and form (large dish). Whatever the merits of these classifications, they do not consider the limitations in which producers worked, which in turn had an impact on the final appearance of the vessel.

Figure 11.1. Porcelain dish with underglaze blue decoration, Yuan dynasty, fourteenth century (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

As products for sale, the ceramics needed attractive designs (decoration) and usable, sturdy forms, which were straightforward to create and repeatable to maximize profits and ensure low production costs. Thus, abundance in one sense was an aim—abundant production to maximize profits and minimize costs. In ceramic production, the maximization of profits also means, among many other things, maximizing capacity in kiln chambers as well as fuel usage while being dependent on supplies of raw materials (including fuelwood), their transportation, and their preparation. In terms of forms, once the process has been organized in an assembly line, the making of large dishes such as the one in figure 11.1, with a standard base, concave sides, and a limited number of rim shapes, is efficient yet provides some variety. The dish shown here has the straight rim shape that appears on many of these dishes. The other rim shape seen in these dishes is usually described as “bracketed” and has numerous pointed projections around the rim. Either rim shape can be made easily using a mold and a profile applied mechanically and repetitiously. Yet if efficiency and cost are important for these commercially produced wares, how then do we explain the “abundant” use of decoration on this dish—a profusion considered characteristic of this type of ware from this time period?

The decoration seen here is notably dense, with consecutive bands descending from the mouth rim, opening onto an even more densely patterned center in which one motif overlays many others on a patterned ground. The dish has been molded to emphasize the banding of the pattern, and every inch of it has been covered with hand-painted motifs in rich cobalt blue. The decorator has allowed for multiple areas of white reserve, giving the entire design a two-color appearance. Such dense and richly patterned decoration requires an abundance of materials to create, including cobalt pigment, time, and the skill required for hand-painting. The large numbers of such dishes that survive suggest that the material and labor were readily available in sufficient quantities during a possible production period of about fifty years for this type of ware. In the literature of this ware (commonly known as “blue and white”), however, studies almost always emphasize the pigment and its rarity, noting the costs assumed to be associated with the procurement of cobalt blue. Many scholars still assume that cobalt was imported into Yuan period China from Persia, where cobalt mines were located at Kashan (e.g., Vainker 2005:138; Finlay 2010:139–40; see also Häggman 2008:148). Sourcing cobalt from this location would have necessitated a number of processes, including mining, proveniencing, transportation to southeast China, and some refining

If it was true that cobalt was expensive to use at that time, especially in great quantities, then there must have been an abundance principle operating in another way—that is, in the association between costs of production and the market (though there is still much debate about the source, distribution, and costs associated with the use of cobalt blue in Chinese ceramics; for a summary, see Kerr and Wood 2004:671–80). An expensive material can be cost-effective if there are enough consumers of the product to offset the cost (cf. Klarich, Levine, and Schultze, this volume). Examples of densely decorated Yuan blue and white wares can be seen in collections formed before the present day in Istanbul (the Topkapi Palace) and Iran (the former Ardebil Shrine collection), as well as at find sites in Okinawa, Kenya, and Indonesia (Misugi 1981; Wilson 2005; Qin, Liu, and Kiriama 2012; Miksic 2009). Surviving pieces from this time period indicate that this kind of dense and abundant design was widely desirable at the time of production. It is notable that this style of decoration became much less common in the subsequent early Ming period in China when other sources of cobalt, including some in China, began to be exploited (Kerr and Wood 2004:682–84).

It is not just the decoration that is abundant on these dishes but also the number of motifs. The dense patterning is often associated in the art historical literature with “Islamic” approaches to design where a form of horror vacui is said to prevail, in which—in theory—no blank space is left showing (see Finlay 2010:171). While such descriptions have been somewhat discredited even in the literature on Islamic art (as summarized by Leaman 2004:40–44), as has the category of “Islamic art” as a whole (see Blair and Bloom 2003), the decoration on these Yuan blue and white dishes does have parallels with those seen on carpets and metalwork from West Asia (see Kadoi 2009 for a study of the material effects of this period of interaction between Persia and China). A closer look at the dish in figure 11.1 reveals that beyond density, a further decorative principle of abundance is operating here: that of repetitiveness. In each of the bands of decoration, similar motifs are repeated and indeed are often scrolling to give a sense of continuity. Only one motif is shown singularly—that of the “double thunderbolt” or “double vajra,” which is associated with Tibetan Buddhism (Beer 2004). This central single motif is nonetheless circled by a band of repeated Buddhist motifs, the “flaming pearl” and the “endless knot.” These are two motifs that in Chinese decorative art are part of a larger category known as the “eight Buddhist emblems” 八吉祥, a collective set of motifs ultimately derived from India (Beer 2004). In Chinese porcelain, repetitiveness in decoration reinforces a visual representation of abundance that in its wide popularity helped stimulate abundant consumption and distribution.

It could be argued that the use of cobalt pigment to paint motifs in such quantities indicates another form of abundance—that of power. If cobalt was difficult and expensive to procure, then the large-scale employment of it visually demonstrates China’s power (economically and diplomatically) to acquire the material in such large quantities. The fact is that most of these blue and white wares were made in commercial kilns during the Yuan period, so this argument necessitates an assumption that commercial kilns were subject to government agendas beyond taxation. This is a complicated assumption to make about this period in Chinese history because the country was subjected to Mongol rule and was thus part of a wider federation that included the assumed source location for cobalt—Persia. Was the pigment therefore even “imported” in the political sense?

Aside from the pigment, it is interesting that the mass-market, global distribution of Yuan blue and white porcelain may also have offset the costs associated with the technique used to apply the decoration. As noted, each of these dishes, including the one in figure 11.1, was hand-painted. None of the decoration appears to have been applied using stencils or transfers; thus, the technique was very labor-intensive. However, thanks to the well-documented nature of porcelain production in China, we also know that labor was generally abundant, so expensive decorative techniques could have been economically viable; modern notions of appropriate working conditions were an undeveloped concept at that time (Kerr and Wood 2004:209–13). Certainly, this applies to the commercial kilns at Jingdezhen, the so-called porcelain city in southeast China where this dish and most porcelain was made from the early fourteenth century onward. Starting at the end of the fourteenth century, there were other producers at Jingdezhen, in addition to the commercial kilns, and their approach to abundance is in some ways similar to and in other, significant ways different from, that of the commercial kilns.

The Ming Imperial Factory

The porcelain factory or workshop at Jingdezhen that receives the most attention in both literature and the art market is the so-called imperial factory, which was formally established during the Ming dynasty in 1392 (see Kerr and Wood 2004 for a summary of the debate about the founding date). As the official supplier of porcelain to the court, the imperial factory operated on different principles than those of the commercial factories, even when contracting out work to the latter. The market was not a concern, as the court in its widest sense was the single consumer, but that also meant there were few limits on consumption at court apart from sumptuary rules, and production was subject to quotas instead of market forces (Pierson 2013:21; Kerr and Wood 2004:202, citing Li and Shen 1963 [1587], ch. 194, p. 1a/2631). This might be viewed as a form of conspicuous consumption as defined by Mason (1981), but to be conspicuous, the consumption needs to be visible; during the Ming period, apart from public ceremonies, the court was a closed setting. Outside the court, however, conspicuous consumption was practiced by the elite to such an extent that it was eventually emulated by the merchant and aspiring classes (Clunas 1991; Burke 1993). With reference to court porcelain, abundance was therefore expressed in very different terms than those used to describe the products of the commercial factories.

During the Ming dynasty, the court required porcelain for a wide range of functions, including everyday dining, banquets, rituals, religion, gifts, and display, among others. Thus, the uses for porcelain at court were themselves abundant in their diversity. Within this abundance was the issue of reuse, as it appears that many court porcelains were only used once; therefore, every year the court sent orders for new porcelain. Certainly, when a new reign period started, new porcelains had to be ordered; since the economic status of each reign was different, the size and frequency of the orders varied accordingly. This is demonstrated by the sometimes massive orders for porcelains sent down from the court (which was based in north China starting in the 1430s) to the imperial factory. One well-known example is the more than 133,000 porcelains ordered by the Court of Imperial Entertainments in 1459 (Kerr and Wood 2004:198). On quite a few occasions, departments of the imperial palace ordered large quantities of porcelains for special events. Often, the kilns could not cope with such massive orders and production quotas were imposed, but clearly quantity was a basic requirement in many court orders. This is partly a result of the reuse issue but also a result of the necessity for large numbers of vessels to be used during state ceremonies and functions. For example, in 1528 the court ordered 189 lead-lined ice chests for the autumn offering at the Civil Temple (Kerr and Wood 2004:203, citing Li and Shen 1963 [1587], ch. 201, p. 26a/2715).

Another feature of imperial porcelains was the specificity of designs because design motifs and colors were symbolic, hierarchical, and therefore regulated. Unlike commercial kilns, whose design choices were driven by the market and economics, the court demanded propriety and appropriateness. Different departments of the imperial household also required different patterns (Kerr and Wood 2004:203). The result was a huge range of designs, colors, palettes, and styles produced by necessity at the imperial porcelain factory (or contracted out for this purpose). As an indication, during the fifteenth century imperial porcelains could be made in at least five colors, monochrome or polychrome-decorated, with hundreds of different motifs or combinations thereof and numerous decorative techniques. During the Ming dynasty, for example, the colors and decoration could be underglaze painted, overglaze painted, a combination of both, slip painted, incised, carved, or molded, sometimes in combinations on the same piece. Visually, the choice of designs for imperial porcelains in the Ming period was controlled but seemingly endless and therefore in abundance—a decorative engagement with plenitude (Smith, this volume).

In addition to decorative techniques, the repertoire of available motifs was also vast. While often used in profusion on imperial porcelains, motifs were used not only for aesthetic reasons but also to indicate distinction. Products produced for the court (including ceramics) were not made speculatively or consumed unconsciously. They were ordered in specific amounts with specific designs and colors stipulated. These designs and colors were subject to various restrictions relating to the function of the vessel, its location of consumption within and beyond the court precincts, and the status of the user within the court. For example, certain patterns were associated with different departments of the court, such as yellow and green wares with paired dragons and phoenixes, which were reserved for the Directorate for Palace Delicacies (Kerr and Wood 2004:203, citing Hucker 1985:410). At the same time, in an earlier period of the Ming dynasty, it was decreed that commoners were forbidden to use vessels with those dragon and phoenix designs (Kerr and Wood 2004:202, citing Li and Shen 1963 [1587], ch. 1, p. 21). Thus, while the repertoire of available motifs and color combinations was seemingly limitless, this abundance of choice required strict control to maintain the appropriateness, exclusiveness, and efficacy of the aesthetics. In this case, we can see that the abundance of potential designs led to a form of anxiety, necessitating imposed scarcity and informing the imposition of sumptuary laws throughout China’s imperial history.

Scarcity is in fact a major consequence of the abundant designs, production, consumption, and functions of Chinese porcelain, particularly with reference to materials. In the case of Ming imperial porcelains, the two economic principles of abundance and scarcity were interrelated (cf. Moore and Schmidt, this volume; Varien, Potter, and Naranjo, this volume). Obviously, the scale of production at the imperial kilns required huge quantities of raw materials and supplies, including clays, minerals, fuels, labor, water, and equipment. The court even required labor in lieu of taxes until the sixteenth century (so-called corvée labor). It is well documented that at times the imperial factory could not cope with the often massive orders from the court and had to contract out production to private kilns (see Kerr and Wood 2004:200).

Supplies of raw materials were also noted to be nearly depleted in official records of production (Scott and Kerr 1994:8). Another factor that influenced production quantities and the use of labor and raw materials was the level of quality control and control of consumption beyond the court. Records state and archaeology confirms that in certain periods, quality control at the imperial factory was very strict and inferior pieces deemed unacceptable to court supervisors were destroyed (Scott and Pierson 1995:6). Distribution of inferior imperial factory products was also prohibited (but not closely monitored). Therefore, production was dependent not just on the receipt of orders but also on approval. For example, during the reign of the Chenghua emperor (r. 1465–87), quality control, as managed by a court official on-site, was such that it has been suggested that an exceptional number of pieces were destroyed for being inferior and not acceptable for court consumption at that time (suggested after analysis of the late Chenghua period stratigraphic level at the imperial kiln site, Jingdezhen; Liu and Lam 1993:65, 69). Today, the positive consequence of this practice has been the discovery of massive sherd heaps at the imperial kiln excavation sites in Jingdezhen. The sherd heaps are particularly capacious for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in general, and we therefore have abundant archaeological material to study imperial ceramic production, an advantage for both ceramic and historical analysis.

The sherd heaps further suggest that for the Ming imperial porcelain factory, waste might also have been a visual and experiential manifestation of abundance. While seemingly contradictory, destruction was an important aspect of production at this time for both consumers and producers of this category of ceramics. As the quantities of sherds demonstrate, the amount of waste is directly associated with the scale of imperial orders and the restrictions of imperial approval; the quality control system ensured that much that was produced was also destroyed. This would have been a reminder for those compelled to produce court porcelains that the end consumer of their products was somewhat capricious and that abundant production was important to ensure compliance. Multiples of each piece needed to be made to increase the likelihood of a perfect piece that would be acceptable for the court. This can be seen as an example of intentional waste, as opposed to incidental waste as in the by-products of metallurgy; therefore, it illustrates “the dynamic relationship between abundance and scarcity” (Smith, this volume). It should not be assumed that the sherd heaps were visible to those outside the factory during the Ming and Qing periods, however. Today, they are an important part of the ceramic tours of Jingdezhen, with the “finest” sherds on display in the local museum, and we might see them as symbols of waste. But for those working at the imperial factory or in the private kilns to which orders were contracted, these discards and their quantity would have been part of daily working life quickly buried by imperial decree.

A final aspect of abundance with reference to Ming imperial porcelains that needs to be addressed is the logistics of transportation, an issue that can also be considered for the earlier Yuan blue and white porcelains discussed above. Geographically, in the Ming period the only imperial porcelain factory (and its associates) was located in the southeastern part of the country, at Jingdezhen. This is over 1,500 km from the court that was eventually located in Beijing (after being moved from Nanjing, near Shanghai). Today, this route can be traveled in multiple ways, but in the Ming period, transportation was much more difficult. Jingdezhen is located in a mountainous area that was not supplied with major roads during the Ming period. Porcelains for the court would have been moved very slowly on horseback and by human power over and through steep mountains to get to the nearest major river, the Chang, then to a lake, the Poyang, and only then to the Yangtze River, which would have enabled north-south travel through a link to the Grand Canal (Dillon 1992). Thus, Jingdezhen’s location was clearly favorable for raw materials but not for distribution, including court wares. Transporting imperial porcelains to the court used further labor and materials (and expense), thus contributing to the overall abundance of exploitation necessitated by the production and consumption of imperial porcelain at court.

A Qing Dynasty Shipwreck

Overland distribution networks would also have been necessary to transport non-imperial ceramics, but starting in the seventeenth century, those for export generally went south toward Canton to be shipped overseas. The distribution of trade porcelains from Jingdezhen began fairly early through ports first established in the Song dynasty (906–1279) and further ports, including some near Canton, in the Yuan (1279–1368) and Ming periods. The evidence for this type of movement beyond China can be traced through texts and shipwrecks, another area of ceramic archaeology where today there is abundant material for study. The export of porcelain from China started in the ninth century (earthenwares and stonewares were exported earlier), but it was in the seventeenth century that large-scale exports of porcelains began to accompany the European trade in eastern commodities such as tea and spices. Much of this trade was managed by the East India Companies, particularly those of the English (EIC) and Dutch (VOC). Tea in particular became a valuable and profitable commodity from the late seventeenth century onward, and large quantities could only be sourced in China at that time. Porcelain was a useful companion product to the tea trade that could both weight the tea ships as additional ballast and line the bottom holds to protect the tea above from dampness and odor contamination (Jacobs 2006:189). Tea was thus the profitable commodity and porcelain the additional (but desirable) product that facilitated the tea trade. Its usefulness was enhanced and to some extent determined by its abundance. No other manufactured product was readily available in the tea-producing area, mass-produced, and therefore relatively cheap, durable, and also salable in Europe after serving its shipping function.

With large-scale shipping came consequent diplomatic, political, and financial challenges in addition to frequent losses as a result of weather, mechanical failure, and human error, among other causes. Thus, a number of wrecks of East India Companies ships provide valuable (if sometimes controversial) evidence for most aspects of the trade. The Dutch East India Company ship Geldermalsen, which wrecked in Indonesian waters in 1752, contained the remains of over 140,000 porcelain vessels, which gives a sense of the scale of this trade in the mid-eighteenth century. Porcelain dealers at the Dutch trading port of Batavia (Jakarta) noted in the 1690s that shipments of over 2 million pieces of porcelain were received from China annually (Ledderose 2000:89, citing Jorg 1986). The cargo of the Geldermalsen, as well as the accompanying documents, also tell about the extensive, multi-stop journeys such porcelains made, as most goods were transhipped on either the inbound or outbound journey.

Porcelain from the wreck of the Geldermalsen is representative of abundance in several ways: it was produced in modular fashion, with many multiples of the same design or form; it was traded and shipped in quantity; and it was consumed in sets of many items. A copy of the packing list for the ship survives (National Archives, the Hague), which lists 171 dinner services and 16 different types of dishes, including 19,535 coffee cups with saucers, 25,921 slop bowls, and 63,623 teacups with saucers (Ledderose 2000:90, citing Jorg 1986; Sheaf and Kilburn 1986). Almost all of this porcelain was blue and white (the enamels on some having deteriorated) and was made in Jingdezhen, the porcelain town that produced the vessel shown in figure 11.1. Thus, the quantity of the product is clearly evident, but abundance is also evident in its forms and design. For example, it is notable that there is a repetitiveness of the design patterns on the wares that come from a very limited repertoire: simple landscapes, flowers, and trees (with the occasional fish).

One scholar, Lothar Ledderose [2000], has noted an interesting feature in this limited repertoire, what he calls a modular system of design (figure 11.2). Essentially, what can be seen if a large number of these pieces is viewed is that the decoration develops in complexity through a systematic sequence of steps in which additional elements are added, starting from a single flower on one piece and leading to a more complex landscape down the line. Some pieces have the simple designs, whereas others have more complex designs representing the addition of different “modules.” This reflects a production line system of manufacture, which was indeed in use at Jingdezhen, as we have seen. All of the decorative motifs can be used on their own or in combination, and they are interchangeable. The sheer abundance of the remains in this shipwreck has thus allowed us to see exactly how such mass quantities of decorated porcelain were produced and how quickly, turning hand-painting into an industrial process.

Figure 11.2. Porcelain bowl with underglaze blue decoration, from the Nanjing Cargo, eighteenth century (British Museum, London).

What we can also see is another representation of what was earlier called an aesthetics of abundance. The individual motifs are not in themselves abundant; rather, their repetitive use in different combinations gives rise to an almost exponential repertoire. This is a further reminder that the porcelains from Jingdezhen, both imperial and non-imperial, were made in a factory setting, using a division of labor in many stages. This resulted in many things, but standardization in particular has to be considered from both a production efficiency perspective and an aesthetic one. Efficiency may have determined the visual appearance of the wares, but the designs that resulted were widely admired outside of China. In this case, the use of a limited number of single but interchangeable motifs enabled an abundance of production and therefore consumption.

For the foreign consumer, the seemingly endless yet coordinated variety of design patterns on the wares, such as those from the Geldermalsen wreck, would have been very attractive, especially as the pieces were intended to be used in sets and not for the most part as individual items. Thus, their function is also reflective of quantity; most of the items were either dinner services or parts of coffee- and tea-drinking sets, as the inventory reveals. From the eighteenth-century consumer’s perspective, these porcelains functioned in groups of objects, thus in quantity, and they came from a place that could apparently supply endless quantities of these desirable items. Certainly, it was cheaper to buy large quantities of porcelain from China at this time (1750s) because European and English porcelain factories were just getting started and large-scale production had not yet been achieved. In addition, the fashion for chinoiserie (Chinese-style designs in interiors, furnishings, and fashion) was also at its height (Pierson 2007).

The aesthetics of Chinese export porcelain, like other wares discussed, are also to some extent informed by the methods of transportation and distribution. Chinese porcelains were transported in bulk, and when they arrived at their final destination and were no longer needed as ballast, they were frequently auctioned off in major European ports such as Amsterdam and London starting in the early seventeenth century. The earliest examples were sometimes auctions of booty, including porcelains and other goods seized from downed ships of other countries. A famous example was the sale of loot from the Santa Catarina, a Portuguese ship captured by the Dutch off Singapore in 1603 (this event and the capture of the ship have been published widely; see Jorg 1986:15; Finlay 2010:253–54; van Ittersum 2003; Funnell and Robertson 2013:171).

The Geldermalsen items were lost at sea, but they, too, would have been sold in a port-side auction, a standard practice for income generation by the East India Companies. The visual aspects of these large-scale sales are of interest here as their mass presence (often upward of 100,000 pieces) would have been spectacular visually, reinforcing existing notions about the material, their manufacture, and their origins. The sale as spectacle is not a well-studied aspect of display history (the few studies that exist relate specifically to European art; see, for example, Richter 2008), but it does seem to provide another example of what Gates-Foster (2014) refers to as a “compelling visual presence.” Certainly, the many visual manifestations of abundance are an important aspect of the appropriation and production of goods in general, particularly those produced on a more massive scale.

Chinese Ceramics and the Culture of Display

The discovery of the Geldermalsen in 1985 provided a window into abundance in the past, presenting evidence for the scale of the trade and distribution as well as of manufacture and design of a particular commodity from China (for a history of the excavation and a description of the porcelains, see Sheaf and Kilburn 1986; Jorg 1986, along with the excavators’ own report, Hatcher 1987). Even though it did not reach its original final destination, the ship was auctioned by Christie’s in Amsterdam in 1986, bringing the goods back to the Netherlands in the end (Christie’s 1986). By all accounts the sale was dramatic and therefore a spectacle, bringing an example of visual abundance from the past into the present, even using the same method of final distribution (the auction) that would have been used in the eighteenth century. This spectacle was cultivated but the methods used, including giving the cargo a name, “the Nanjing Cargo,” were effective in ensuring that this was the most publicized and largest auction of porcelain in Christie’s history at that time (Gould 2011:342–43; Associated Press 1986). After lying on the bed of the South China Sea for over 250 years, these pieces had an afterlife that mirrored the distribution and visual presentations of their first life. In aesthetic and design terms, too, these pieces from the Nanjing Cargo now have a well-known, shipping-related provenance. They are still widely collected and thus remain in circulation, but perhaps few are used for their intended purpose as tablewares. Instead, they have been transformed through time and consumption into objects collected in quantity—a form of abundance that for Chinese porcelain did not begin in Europe until the nineteenth century.

The display of mass quantities of Chinese porcelain (arguably a form of collecting in itself), however, began much earlier in Europe and Britain as well as outside Europe, especially in areas of West Asia that had powerful ruling dynasties. In the history of Chinese ceramics, one of the most famous “collections” outside greater China was assembled and displayed in Safavid Iran at the Ardebil Shrine, and a further assemblage was created in Ottoman Turkey at the Topkapi Palace (both sites have been extensively published and are surveyed in Misugi 1981). The Ardebil Shrine display in particular used visual abundance to reinforce the power and wealth of the sitting ruler, Shah 'Abbas (r. 1587–1629). Within a complex of buildings associated with a royal tomb, one space was converted into a chinikhaneh, or china hall, where royal treasures belonging to the Safavid royal family were housed after 1608. In this space, around 1,100 Chinese ceramics were displayed in niches set into the walls above displays of rare books. These foreign ceramics, many of them blue and white porcelains, were reappropriated as Safavid material culture (Pierson 2012).

The display of Chinese porcelains in architectural settings was also practiced in Europe and Britain, for similar reasons. Some of the earliest architectural displays of Chinese porcelain could be seen in Britain in the early seventeenth century in the homes of elite members of London society (Bracken 2001). In continental Europe, a number of royal palaces featured rooms designated to have lavish displays of Chinese porcelain installed on the walls. One very famous example is the porcelain room in the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, where mirrored walls were completely covered with blue and white Chinese and Japanese porcelain from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Scharmann 2005). The scale of such displays is truly extravagant and dependent on quantity for its effect. The aesthetics and function of abundance in the interior are areas for potential future research but ones that for our purposes reinforce the significance and the role of quantity and excess in both the production and consumption of Chinese porcelain worldwide.

Display is still a significant form of representation in the archaeology of Chinese ceramics, particularly in China. A late-twentieth-century development in China gives a sense of how extensive the association of abundance with porcelain is in both archaeological and aesthetic perspectives, even in the present day. In the 1980s a number of kiln sites were excavated at Jingdezhen, and they revealed the extent and variety of production, particularly at the imperial kilns, during the Ming dynasty (e.g., Urban Council 1989; Liu 1996, 1998). Thousands of sherds were found in well-stratified layers dating from the early Ming dynasty to the sixteenth century. Interestingly, many of the sherds were exhibited and published in exhibition catalogs (Jingdezhen Institute 1992; Liu and Lam 1993). This phenomenon heralded the now familiar fashion of displaying archaeologically recovered sherds similarly to intact collected pieces—that is, aesthetically, in museum style. In China, since the advent of professional archaeology in that country in the twentieth century, archaeology has been seen as both science and a visual commodity, with entire museums built around exposed sites. The exhibitions of excavated sherds, however, visually represented a new way of thinking about ceramics in China, for the broken pots and reconstructed pieces were presented as the remains of production, were found in great quantities, and were displayed in their destroyed state. Bearing in mind that these were also wasters, viewers were invited to admire this waste, which would stand for absent perfect pieces.²

The great quantities of sherds on display in Jingdezhen museums, now available for study, contrast greatly with the concurrent celebration of the opposite principle of scarcity in the market for rare Chinese porcelains. This is represented by several recent spectacular auction sales of single pieces, including one small Ming cup that sold for $36 million in 2014 (Sothebys Hong Kong 2014). Porcelains like this are also from Jingdezhen, but they have been made singular through the intervention of time, collecting, and what has been called the economics of singularity (Karpik 2010). With Chinese porcelains, it seems that both abundance and scarcity are operating principles, with one informing the other, for it is clear that without the fundamental abundance in production, aesthetics, and consumption, there could be no scarcity in this case.

Conclusion

Examining Jingdezhen porcelains of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties through the lens of abundance allows us to reexamine and re-frame both the visual and material characteristics of these ceramics, as well as their movement and impact. In the case of the Yuan dish, we can see that production and decoration in quantity were desirable both domestically and in the trade environment with reference to taste and market forces. In contrast, in the Ming imperial factory, quantity became a liability because of cultural conventions requiring greater control and therefore limitation. While subject to different economic forces than were Yuan blue and white porcelains, Ming imperial porcelains nevertheless still required similar production support in terms of material, labor, and transportation—demonstrating the concurrent duality of quantity and scarcity operating here.

In the Qing dynasty, imperial porcelain was still produced but with different cultural forces at work, which impacted the trade ceramic industry of the time. The cargo of the vast eighteenth-century ship Geldermalsen, destroyed in Indonesian waters, reflected one such force: insularity. Chinese merchants overseas, who would be part of the distribution network for porcelains around the world, were effectively exiled, and much of the maritime distribution of Chinese porcelain from Canton was handled by foreign merchants such as members of the EIC, who were restricted to zoned residential areas and not permitted to live in China proper. The very successful product from China that porcelain represented was therefore strictly separated from domestic examples in the Qing dynasty. Nevertheless, this excluded porcelain also reflected the key aspects of abundance in Chinese ceramics: large-scale production, with consequently large quantities of supplies and labor; repetitive, plentiful decoration; wide distribution, including in this case beyond China; and the visual manifestations of quantity embodied in sets, display, and destruction. This single type of object reflected varying Chinese attitudes toward functional products (as well as foreign ones), which in the case of porcelain have been shown to be considered more than just physical objects but also a manifestation of ideas about things, things in quantity, and the corollary—scarcity—but also about consumption, identity, and the world as a vast market for Chinese commercial and diplomatic goods. Jingdezhen porcelain was a suitably diverse model, but other Chinese goods were also widely distributed through the same networks, and these, too, would be a mirror for both Chinese society and the societies that appropriated china.