“…if he took it into his head…he without the least ceremony overset the table. The first time he practiced this, I was very angry at such a quantity of handsome China being thus mischievously demolished, and expressed my displeasure thereat. ‘Why, zounds!’ said he, ‘You surely forget where you are. I never suffer the servants to have the trouble of removing a tea equipage, always throwing the whole out the window or downstairs. They easily procure another batch….’”

~ an Englishman’s recollections of Canton in 1770,
Memoirs of William Hickey

Second only to tea, perhaps the most important contribution China made to European life was “china” itself – the hard translucent glazed pottery the Chinese had invented under the Tang dynasty and which we also know as porcelain. China had long since exported porcelain over the Silk Route to Persia and Turkey and fine examples of pre-1500 china are still in everyday use there. (An English diplomat collected almost five tons (!) of Ming pieces while serving in Iran in 1875.) In Europe before the dawn of the China trade, the highest achievement of the potter’s art was a kind of earthenware which was fired, then coated with an opaque glaze and fired again, fixing the colors with which it had been painted. This was generally named for its supposed place of origin and was known as majolica in Italy, faience in France, Delft in the Low Countries, and so forth. No earthenware could stand up to boiling water without dissolving and nowhere in Europe was it understood how to heat a kiln to the fourteen hundred degrees or so required to vitrify clay and make it impervious to liquids, boiling or not. Even so wise a man as Sir Francis Bacon could only view porcelain as a kind of plaster which, after a long lapse of time buried in the earth, “congealed and glazed itself into that fine substance.” Other writers speculated it was made from lobster shell or eggs pounded into dust.

Porcelain in time became the only Chinese import to rival tea in popularity. The wealthy collected it on a grand scale and even middle class people became so carried away that Daniel Defoe could complain of china “on every chimney-piece, to the tops of ceilings, ‘til it became a grievance.” Such abundance half the world away from its place of manufacture was due to its use as ships’ ballast. The China trade came to rest on two water-sensitive, high-value commodities: silk and tea. These had to be carried in the middle of the ship to prevent water damage, but to trim the ship and make her sail properly, about half the cargo’s weight (not volume) was needed below the waterline in the bilges. Very roughly, a quarter of all tea imported had to be matched by ballast and from the ships’ records available, it appears that about a quarter of all ballast was porcelain. Over the course of the 1700s England probably imported twenty-four thousand tons of porcelain while roughly equal amount would have been imported into Europe and the American colonies.

---

Editor’s Note on the Images
Top left: A rare underglaze copper-red Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) vase that was auctioned for a record price of HKD $78.52 million (USD $10.13 million) in May 2006. Bottom right: Painting of a Chinese vessel known as “The Desaru” which sank in the 1840’s with a cargo of Chinese ceramics.