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The blue in Chinese blue-and-white porcelain came from Iran

The deep blue on Chinese blue-and-white porcelain began as Persian cobalt shipped east to Jingdezhen. Here is how the exchange worked, and how Europe copied it.

In Room 95 of the British Museum, a pair of tall porcelain vases stands on display. Elephant heads form the handles, a four-clawed dragon moves through clouds around the body, and down one side of each neck runs a long inscription painted in underglaze blue. It is a dated record of a prayer: in 1351 a man named Zhang Wenjin, from Yushan county in Jiangxi, presented the two vases and an incense burner to a Daoist temple, asking for the safety of his family. The vessels, known as the David Vases, carry the earliest known dated dedication on blue-and-white porcelain. Nothing in their appearance announces their strangest fact. The blue on Zhang Wenjin’s vases did not begin in China.

A town named after an era

The vases were made in Jingdezhen, a city in northeastern Jiangxi whose name is itself a piece of porcelain history. The town on the south bank of the Chang River began as a market settlement called Changnanzhen; in 1004, the first year of the Jingde era, Emperor Zhenzong of the Song dynasty gave the town his reign name, in recognition of the quality of its porcelain, and Changnanzhen became Jingdezhen. Hu Jiang, director of the Shanghai History Museum, put the consequence plainly in China Daily: “fires have burned in the kilns of Jingdezhen for more than 1,000 years, which built its reputation as the world’s capital of porcelain.”

What the kilns had mastered was a material, not just a style. True porcelain, first made in China, is a mixture of china stone — a feldspathic rock, ground to powder — and kaolin, a white clay. Fired at around 1,450°C, the china stone vitrifies while the kaolin holds the object’s shape, producing a material that is hard, fine-grained, white and usually translucent. The recipe stayed a closely kept secret for centuries, which is a large part of why the ware was so prized abroad. The painted version, the term Chinese catalogues write as qinghua (青花), added one more ingredient, and that one had to be imported.

A blue that crossed the Silk Road

The pigment is cobalt, and by the time Jingdezhen’s painters needed it, a primary source was Persia. Cobalt ore was scarce and had to be specially processed, then pulverized into a paint — and it was valued for a technical reason: painted onto ceramics and fired at high temperature, the colour stays vivid and the outlines of the forms stay crisp. For the Yuan-dynasty jars and dishes that museums hold today, the cobalt for the blue underglaze was imported from Iran, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, which owns a classic example, notes that the ore most likely came from Kashan.

The exchange went further than raw material. A Yuan jar in Cleveland carries a band of cloud-collar motifs with phoenixes against floral grounds, a decorative vocabulary the museum traces to Iranian arts of the Ilkhanid period. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, describing a late-Yuan platter, points to the same shapes and notes that scholars believe the cloud collar reached China through Persian metalwork or the Mongol and Tatar embroideries traded at the time. Under the Mongol empire, artistic ideas and techniques moved along the same routes as the ore and the finished pots. The “Chinese” pattern language, in other words, is partly a shared Eurasian one.

The vases that anchor the dating

The David Vases matter because they carry a date. Their inscription, translated at the British Museum, records the offering by Zhang Wenjin “in the 4th month, 11th year of the Zhizheng reign” — 1351, near the end of the Yuan dynasty. Yushan county, where he lived, is about 120 kilometres southeast of Jingdezhen, where the vases were made, and the temple he gave them to stood at Xingyuan, in what is now Wuyuan county. The shape of the vases copies ancient bronze vessels, and the elephant-head handles once carried porcelain rings.

For historians the dedication is a fixed point. It shows that blue-and-white production at Jingdezhen was already mature by 1351, less than two decades before the Yuan dynasty fell. The Cleveland jar reinforces the point from another direction: that type of ware was being produced no later than the 1330s, for both domestic use — the court and common people alike — and overseas trade. Blue-and-white is often taken as a Ming achievement; in its developed form it was a Yuan one.

Built for export, not just for the court

From the beginning, this ware was a product with foreign customers in view. Yuan blue-and-white served Chinese buyers, but it also left China along the trade routes of the Mongol empire and the sea lanes beyond them. Cobalt moved east; porcelain moved west, coveted in the markets it reached. The designs travelled with the trade too, which is why Chinese platters carry cloud collars that scholars trace to Persian metalwork. The whiteness — the property the whole porcelain technology existed to achieve — was precisely what the deep imported blue was painted on to set off.

The Dutch, the carrack and the copy

From the second half of the sixteenth century, Jingdezhen mass-produced a distinctive export porcelain decorated with panels radiating from a central medallion — the first porcelain made expressly for export on that scale. The Dutch called it kraak porcelain, their name for the carrack, the ocean-going merchant ship, though one Victoria and Albert Museum record notes the word has also been linked to the chimney shelves where such porcelain was displayed. The name stuck because of how the ware arrived. In the early 1600s, cargoes of Chinese porcelain reached Holland aboard Portuguese ships seized by the Dutch at sea, and the pieces were auctioned at Middelburg and Amsterdam to great profit.

The trade was then organized at a new scale. The Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, shipped the panelled wares in unprecedented quantities, standardising shapes so that dishes stacked light and tight, cutting transport costs and reaching markets as far as the Americas. The exchange ran both ways: a kraak dish in the V&A, made in Jingdezhen in the mid-seventeenth century, carries tulips on its rim inspired by European decorative styles.

Dutch potters could not make porcelain — Europeans did not learn that secret until the early eighteenth century — so the kilns of Delft copied kraak porcelain in tin-glazed earthenware instead, imitating the blue-and-white surface on a ceramic body they could produce. The familiar Delft Blue of the Netherlands is a direct descendant of a Jingdezhen export style.

What to look for

Once the backstory is in place, any piece of blue-and-white becomes more interesting to read. A few things worth checking:

  • Whether the decoration runs in a continuous scene or is divided into radiating panels — the panelled style is the kraak export ware the Dutch carried to markets as far as the Americas.
  • The blue itself. Yuan jars were prized for a brilliant blue, and it is worth remembering what that colour cost: ore shipped from Iran before it ever reached a kiln.
  • Any inscription. On the David Vases, one line of text on a neck is what fixed an entire chronology.

A blue-and-white plate looks like a closed, self-contained “Chinese” object. Its materials and its audience say otherwise: Chinese clay and fire, Persian ore, shared Mongol-era motifs, Dutch ships and Dutch copies. Few objects carry a longer record of exchange in such a quiet surface. This story is part of our coverage of the arts in China; for more, browse the article archive. If the trade hidden inside ordinary things appeals to you, the Sichuan peppercorn has a story of its own.

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