Chinese porcelain part 3

Jingdezhen

Decorating porcelain at modern-day JingdezhenThe city of Jingdezhen has been an important centre for the production of ceramics in southern China since at least the early Han Dynasty. The early wares were low-fired but by the time of the Southern and

Northern Dynasties (420 to 589) locally available raw materials were being used to produce a form of porcelain. In the year 1004, under the Song emperor Jingde, the newly re-named city of Jingdezhen was established as a centre for the production of Imperial porcelain.

Detailed descriptions of the manufacture of porcelain at Jingdezhen during the Qing dynasty exist, including a memoir written by Tang Ying and the letters of Père d'Entrecolles.

Two letters written by Père Francois Xavier d'Entrecolles [1], a Jesuit missionary (and industrial spy) who lived and worked in Jingdezhen, described in detail the methods and materials used in the manufacturing process of porcelain wares in the later years of the reign of the Kangxi emperor; an important period in the history of Chinese ceramics. In his first letter, dated 1712, d'Entrecolles described the way in which porcelain stone was crushed, refined and formed into little white bricks known in Chinese as petuntse or baidunzi. He then went on to describe the refining of china clay, kaolin or Gaoling, the preparation of glazes, the stages of forming porcelain wares, glazing and firing. Père d'Entrecolles, explaining his motives for describing what he had seen at Jingdezhen, states that "Nothing but my curiosity could ever have prompted me to such researches, but it appears to me that a minute description of all that concerns this kind of work might, somehow, be useful in Europe" but his first letter came too late to be of much help in the European search for the secret of making porcelain. In 1743, during the reign of the Qianlong emperor, Tang Ying, the imperial supervisor at Jingdezhen produced a memoir entitled "Twenty illustrations of the manufacture of porcelain." Unfortunately, the original illustrations have been lost but the text of the memoir is still accessible, together with photographs replacing the missing illustrations and an additional commentary. [2]

Some notable Chinese porcelain wares
Jian tea wares

Song dynasty Jian tea bowl (Metropolitan Museum of Art).Jian blackwares, mainly comprising tea wares, were made at kilns in the county of Jianyang in the province of Fujian and reached the height of their popularity during the Song dynasty. The wares were made using locally-won, iron-rich clays and fired in an oxidizing atmosphere at

 temperatures in the region of 1300 degrees Celsius. The glaze was made using clay similar to that used for forming the body, but fluxed with wood-ash. At high temperatures in the kiln phases within the molten glaze separated to produce the patterning called hare's fur. Some pooling of the glaze is usually evident in Jian wares and where the bowls were set tilted for firing the glaze often ran into drips on one side of the bowl.

                                                                               Cont'd Part 4

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