I would like to express my gratitude to the editors of the journal, and especially to the anonymous readers who offered many helpful suggestions.
1Making a usable piece of ceramics requires two fundamental resources: clay, to shape the body, and firewood, to fire the clay. Ceramics are ubiquitous through time and space because, in most places, both clay and firewood have been readily available. Even places with only rough clay and an irregular supply of firewood could produce usable vessels of varying sizes and shapes. The low quality of such ceramics often meant that their wide circulation and trade were not considered warranted; after all, other places also made their usable but low-quality wares with their own basic resources. Better resources in the form of higher-quality clay and regular supply of fuel generally led to the production of higher-quality ceramic pieces. However, more than the quality of resources is needed to explain the production of outstanding pieces of ceramics that are deemed worthy of circulating more widely.
- 1 Dam, 2004; Dumortier, 2002; Kerr, Wood, 2004; Medley, 2006.
2So, what factors beyond the quality of the available resources are key for turning basic, locally usable pieces of ceramics into pieces considered worth circulating? What transforms basic resources into fine commodities includes factors such as the availability of skilled workers and access to the necessary techniques and processes. As has long been established in discussions of ceramics production, both in Europe and China, the techniques and processes required were multiple. From shaping bodies and glazingshaped wares to firing the pieces and adding further decorations, many workers with a wide range of distinct skills were involved.1 The places that combined high-quality resources and skilled workers with access to high-level techniques were the sites that produced the best ceramics that circulated far and wide. For example, the Dutch ceramics manufacturing city of Delft and China’s foremost site of ceramics production, Jingdezhen, produced outstanding ceramics that circulated throughout the early modern period.
3In the scholarship about these production sites, the ceramics production process is often understood and represented as taking place within a single space. This paper seeks to add a further dimension to this idea of a series of connected processes available in a single space that transforms basic resources like clay and firewood into valuable, commercial products. It expands our understanding of the production process beyond the immediate surroundings, casting the net more widely to reveal the importance of connected resources and processes across space. Continuing to draw on the examples of Delft and Jingdezhen, this paper suggests that to understand how natural resources for the production of ceramics were transformed into the finest quality ceramics for local and global consumption, we need to expand the chain of production beyond the immediate site of production. Both “Delft” and “Jingdezhen” have become shorthand terms for sites of high-quality ceramics manufacture. However, both could not have existed without a less visible but crucially important expansive web of connected resources and skills that stretched across a wider geographical range than is conventionally understood.
4Methodologically speaking, I draw on a very commonplace idea from the history of technology: the idea of the chaîne opératoire.2 In other disciplines and fields, too, the concepts of supply chain and chain of production are also very important. The point in all these is the chain: the connected nature of seemingly unconnected elements that are part of both production and trade. The argument I would like to make here concerns the importance of identifying the so-called chains that connect different types of trade, commercial actors and production processes in ceramics manufacture in early modern China. These begin with sourcing the raw materials and end with global distribution. Revealing these chains points to the connections between different types of trades and traders, as well as between manufacturing and commercial interactions.
5I will begin with two visual representations of ceramics production, one in Europe (the ceramic tile factory in Bolsward) and one in Asia (the porcelain manufactures of Arita in Japan). Both depict the manufacturing process on a ceramic surface (earthenware in the case of the first; porcelain in the second), and both emphasize a diverse range of resources and processes that all come together within a single space. Both create the impression that the transformation from raw materials to fine ceramics happens within the confines of a single architectural structure. A brief discussion of other images and relevant sources will suggest that this was, in fact, a widespread conceptualization of ceramics production: strongly associated with a single space and depicted as taking place within a single site.
6I will then present a selection of both visual and written sources related to Delft and Jingdezhen that demonstrate that both resources and skills were drawn from a much wider geographical space than the shorthand of the city names suggests. What is rendered visible in representations of the production process excludes the invisible parts of the production chain from sight. This includes the web of resources and skills elements that stretch further into the surroundings, beyond the immediate site of production. My textual examples here will not cover the whole production process but focus on two essential resources: clay and firewood. Finally, I conclude that we see a more holistic image of the production process only by extending the chain of production beyond the immediate site of production across an extended space. Only then does the complexity of the transformative process from basic resources like clay and firewood to globally circulating goods become fully visible.
7In the mid-eighteenth century, a tableau was manufactured by combining 14 x 11 tiles into a single depiction of a fully operational pottery and tile factory. The space represented is a three-storied building with a single stove connecting each layer. As the inscription at the top reveals, the building was located in the city of Bolsward in Friesland (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. – Panel of 154 tiles depicting the tile and pottery factory in Bolsward, anonymous, c. 1745-c. 1765
Tin-glazed earthenware (182.5 × 144 cm). Collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Inv. no. BK-NM-5853.
- 3 Bergsma, 2019.
- 4 These four are Johannes Tichelaar, Jan Lolles Steensma, Hero de Jager en Wybe Lolles Steensma (IOH: (...)
8The city of Bolsward, in the province of Friesland in the north-eastern Netherlands, where the tile and pottery factory depicted here was located, was one of the eleven Friesian towns with medieval city rights and a member of the Hanseatic league.3 Bolsward’s “gleibakkerij” (majolica manufacture) opened in 1737. As the cartouche at the top of the tableau indicates, the tableau was financed by four individuals, whose family crests adorn the top layer.4 At ground level, the tableau depicts the painting studio all the way to the left, the wood store, workers carrying wood, and to the right a grinding mill and a stamp mill powered by horses, both for the refinement of the raw materials. The middle level depicts two groups of workers in either side of the chimney, making pots under the watchful eye of a supervisor, who stands out by way of the clothes he wears and the pipe he smokes. Each group of workers is made up of one potter sitting at a workstation, throwing pots, while attendants prepare the clay and move the clay bodies onto the shelving against the back wall for drying. Two further figures tend the fire in the chimney. The top level of the tableau depicts the process of making tiles. Several workers use a variety of implements to flatten and square off the clay, shape the tiles and decorate their surface, while two other workers are occupied with clay preparation. The space is also dominated by racks on which the flat tiles are placed to dry. Most of the workers seem to be male, but one prominently depicted woman stands between the painting workshop and the entrance of the chimney on the lowest level, her raised hand seemingly giving guidance or instruction to those on the other side of the window. The prominence of the single chimney that connects the three layers emphasizes the confinement of the production process into this single manufacturing site.
- 5 Chen, 2023; Huang, 2012; Lam, 1998; Schäfer, 2011; Song Yingxing 宋应星, 2004 (1636); Tang Ying 唐英, 20 (...)
9The depiction of the various processes that form part of ceramics manufacture, such as we see it in the Bolsward tableau, also appears in several Asian contexts. The earliest Chinese illustrations may well be those in the Ming scholar Song Yingxing’s 1637 treatise on the creation of all things, while the most famous is probably the depiction of porcelain manufacture in an annotated album of paintings that circulated during the reign of the Qianlong emperor in the mid-eighteenth century.5 Depictions of the manufacture process on a porcelain surface also appeared as early as the eighteenth century, including a large fishbowl decorated in overglaze decoration with composite scenes of the porcelain production workshops, now in the Kunstmuseum in The Hague. The most similar in appearance to the Bolsward tableau is perhaps a large Japanese nineteenth-century blue-and-white dish (Fig. 2), now in the Mesdag Collection, also in The Hague.
Fig. 2. – Dish depicting a porcelain factory in Arita, c. 1850-1875
Blue and white porcelain (10.4 x 60 cm). The Mesdag Collection, Den Haag. Inv. no. hwm0453.
10This Japanese dish is decorated with a composition made up of nine separate vignettes, depicting separate parts of the process, starting with digging for clay, the preparation of the clay, and the shaping of the bodies, followed by decorating the bodies with brush, glazing, firing and eventually selling the wares. The scene in the centre of the plate shows both the kneading of the clay to prepare it for shaping and the throwing of pots on the potter’s wheel. All of these scenes are combined in a single composite image, emphasizing the unity of the process in one site rather than their separation across diverse spaces. The composition also allows the viewer to see the site in perspective: from a distance, the dark lines that depict the structural shapes of the central workshop space create a depth of vision, facilitating a peek inside a single workshop. Only when one approaches the object more closely do the separate vignettes surrounding this central space appear more clearly, and the viewer seeks to distinguish a narrative view from one step of the process to the next.
11The first impression the viewer gains when confronted with the representations of Bolsward and Arita concerns the coherence of the complex processes depicted there. From the workers carrying wood and preparing clay to the shapers of pots and painters of tiles, everyone seems to know exactly what they are meant to be doing. From raw resources to finished tiles, an intentional sequence connects the workers. Spaces are distinguished by separate tasks, while social hierarchies are marked by clothing, postures, and gestures. These distinct activities are connected by the power of heat, represented in the chimney that cuts through the layers and unifies the process. Furthermore, all the Bolsward tile and pottery factory activities happen under the watchful eye of the four men represented by their crests, whose money we can assume made the factory’s founding (and the tableau that celebrates its founding) possible.
- 6 Diderot (ed. by Gillispie), 1959, plate 460.
- 7 Ibid., plates 461-462.
- 8 See, for example, a lidded terrine in the collection of the Groninger Museum. Gerritsen, 2020b, p. (...)
- 9 Wang, 2015.
12The conceptualization of ceramics production as taking place at a single site, illustrated above by figures 1 and 2, is also confirmed in many other types of sources. European encyclopaedias of the eighteenth century, such as Diderot’s Encyclopédie included an illustration entitled “Pottery,” with four craftsmen working in the same space: one working on a wheel creating basic shapes, another standing next to him adding a spout to a tall vessel, a figure in the middle preparing a wooden base for a shaving bowl, and another preparing the thin tubes used for making clay pipes. For Diderot, “pottery” included manufacturing a wide range of objects in a single space.6 Several other plates added as a supplement to Diderot’s Encyclopédie depict the European manufacture of porcelain. “L’art de faire la porcelaine” depicts on one side the preparation of clays outside Limoges, with men breaking up the hard clay with a hammer, grinding it in a mortar, purifying it by sieving it, and eventually roasting it, before transporting it to the potters. The next plate, depicting workings within the same structural workspace with a single roof, depicts men sitting at a table, adding the paint that is prepared on the right-hand side of the image to the porcelain bodies. The depiction is emphatically situated within a single architectural space.7 Many European depictions of the manufacture of porcelain followed this model. Chinoiserie plates, made in China or Europe but in the Chinese style, also emphasized the Chinese manufacture of porcelain within a single space, though frequently with a series of workshops all facing a shared central space, criss-crossed by workers transporting the ceramics in different stages of completion to other workshop spaces. Again, the emphasis is on the single site.8 The Chinese convention of referring to ceramics as made in different kilns and naming the ceramics after these sites goes back to at least the fourteenth century, when a famous guide for collectors of porcelain was published, identifying the different types of Chinese ceramics by the name of the closest place to the production site. Jingdezhen wares are an example, as are Dehua wares or Cizhou wares. More recent scholarship has begun to question this close association of a type of ceramics with a single site, but the conceptualization of ceramics production as organized around individual sites remains strong.9
13Closer inspection and reflection would suggest that the space connected by these manufacturing processes represented in, for example, the Bolsward tableau in fact stretches out much further than simply those surrounding the chimney and within the financial purview of the four founding Bolsward families. What about the transfer of the technological know-how for making tiles that made this factory possible? What about the mine that yielded the cobalt used to provide the blue colour on the surface of each tile? What about the makers of the brushes held in the hands of the painters on the ground floor? What about the forests that yielded the firewood, the shelving for the drying pieces, and the imposing machines used for pulverizing the clay, and so on and so forth? A much more extensive, albeit less visible network stretched out across a far wider geographical space, encompassed many more connected processes, and drew on a far wider network of resources than the tableau at first glance suggests.
- 10 Mueller, 2022.
- 11 Ibid., 2019.
14Some visual representations point to this spatial dimension stretched across space. An example is a group of Chinese panels depicting the ceramics manufacturing processes, recently discussed by Shirley Mueller.10 This set of seventeen panels in different shapes, now in a private collection, probably also dates to the nineteenth century, though later than the Arita dish. The panels or plaques are three-dimensional and, according to Mueller, have been carved rather than moulded. Mueller’s very plausible argument is that these plaques were created for integration into a larger wooden panel or screen that has not survived. This would explain the variety of shapes and the lack of attention to the verso of the panels, as these were intended not to be seen.11
15Rather than demonstrating a single site of production, the Mueller panels depict separate and distinct spaces in which the steps of ceramics manufacture take place: mining for clay in a mountainous environment with paths and steps indicating height difference; making saggers in a workshop space without windows; preparing porcelain briquettes in a space with doors and a framed window; shaping clay bodies with furniture like stools and drying racks, and so on. Unlike the Bolsward tableau and the Mesdag dish, these plaques emphasize the physical and spatial separation of the resources and processes. In what follows, I will draw on a small number of written sources to point to these spatial separations in the production process. The point is not to deny the integrated nature of these processes; indeed, they belong to a coherent and connected manufacturing process. Contrary to common renderings, the transformation from raw resources to final product also happens across dispersed spaces, which makes their integration even more interesting and important.
- 12 Kok, 1780, part. 1, p. 40-42.
- 13 Ibid., p. 40.
- 14 Ibid.
- 15 “Welke vier zoorten onder een gemengd moeten worden, kunnende de een zonder den ander van geen dien (...)
- 16 Ibid., p. 41.
- 17 Ibid., p. 42.
16The manufacture of ceramics in places like Bolsward and Delft can only provide a limited example of the wide diversity of early modern European ceramics production. Nonetheless, the case of Delft provides ample illustration of the wide geographical range of resources and skills required to transform clay into the famed Delft ceramics. When the Amsterdam bookdealer Jacobus Kok (1734-1788) began the first edition of his 35-volume dictionary (Vaderlandsch woordenboek) in 1780, he included a section on ceramics (“Aardewerk”).12 More an encyclopaedia than a dictionary, Vaderlandsch woordenboek begins by equating earthenware (“aardewerk”) with Delft porcelain (“Delfs Porcelein”).13 Delft, in Kok’s understanding, was where earthenware had been discovered (“uitgevonden”), and from where the practice of making earthenware had spread, firstly throughout the Dutch provinces, and thereafter to Spain, the East and West Indies, Sweden, and Denmark, to a total of over 30 different factories.14 According to Kok, four kinds of clay were required for the manufacture of Delftware: clay from Doornik (Tournai) or Brabant; from Germany (specifically, Mulheim an der Rhoer); black clay; and finally, Delft clay. These four types had to be mixed, as none of these would serve the purpose of making “Delft porcelain” without the others.15 The mixing of these four clays, Kok explains, happens along the river Schie, and specifically, the Rotterdamsche Schie. The Schie connected the city of Delft to the ports along the Maas (Meuse in French), including Rotterdam and Schiedam, but split into three separate arms, with the Rotterdamsche Schie closest to Rotterdam and its port. Presumably, the different clays were brought by boat from their origins to the south in Brabant and the east in Germany and refined on the edges of the Schie before being transported to Delft, for further processing. Kok then describes the turning and shaping of ceramic bodies, which are given a first firing in the kilns, from which they appear the colour of grey stone (“graauwe steen”). This grey surface was then covered with a white glaze, whose contents Kok describes as containing “English tin and lead,” mixed with sand, soda and salt.16 This “English tin” was the most expensive ingredient of all the required resources for making what he calls “Delfts” earthenware. Kok ends his observations on a somewhat melancholy tone, observing that the Delft potters had not been able to remain competitive in the global market, and that in fact, the English earthenware had surpassed Delftware in smoothness, thinness and precision (“gladheid, dunte en nettigheid”).17 To combat this problem, Kok suggested the award of a prize for the person who could restore Delfts ceramics manufactures to their former glory. His emphasis on the place of Delft, which was not only the site mostly associated with this production, but a city entirely dependent on ceramics manufactures, is striking, especially in the context of the far-flung ingredients that were brought to Delft from the surrounding countries of Germany, England and northern France (now Belgium). The resources were far from Delft, but their transformation into good-quality ceramics happened in the place where the skilled workers were located.
- 18 So-called proto-porcelain was already being produced in China during the Shang dynasty (c. 1700 to (...)
- 19 Pierson, 2012.
- 20 Jörg, 2007.
17A few basic outlines of the early modern Chinese ceramics manufacturing process are perhaps helpful here. The quality of the clay available in imperial China facilitated the production of high-fired, finely potted ceramics identifiable as porcelain as early as the seventh century.18 A wide variety of clays produced by different geological formations allowed for manufacturing a range of ceramics, creating distinct wares associated with specific regions. In what is now Jiangxi Province, the clays surrounding the town of Jingdezhen were famous for their fine texture and the whiteness of the fired ceramic bodies. Medieval European exposure to China-made porcelain was rare and usually only occurred as a result of exceptional gifting processes between members of the highest social circles.19 Blue-and-white porcelain, white porcelain decorated under the glaze with cobalt blue pigment, probably China’s most iconic export product, first began to be manufactured during the thirteenth century, a production process that grew in quality and quantity over the course of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Blue-and-white porcelains reached Europe from the early sixteenth century, when Portuguese visitors to the South China coast were able to purchase, and later order, pieces to take home to Portuguese royalty.20
- 21 Beijing daxue kaogu wenbo xueyuan, Jiangxi sheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo, 2009; Gerritsen, 2020a; Med (...)
- 22 Gerritsen, 2020a.
18The global trade in Chinese porcelain was already well-established in the seventeenth century, with the regular arrival of first Dutch and then British ships. To supply the ports on the south coast, barges full of porcelain boxes travelled along the inland waterways from the Chang River near Jingdezhen to Lake Poyang, via the Gan River to Canton, and via the Yangzi and the Grand Canal to the imperial capital. Overseas traders famously stashed their ships full of porcelain crates to balance their ships. The production of porcelain happened within Jingdezhen in the imperial kilns under the auspices of the imperial court. The imperial kilns produced imperial porcelain for the use of the emperor, who requisitioned porcelain from Jingdezhen on an irregular basis by way of tribute from the region.21 Throughout the region, however, porcelain was also produced in private kilns. In fact, the relationship between the private kilns and imperial kilns could be identified as a kind of outsourcing, with goods produced at the private kilns integrated into the production to fulfil the imperial demand. The porcelain for export came largely from the private kilns. What I have sought to argue in my Jingdezhen book is that these two production modes, private and imperial, should be seen as connected, through labour, natural resources, shapes and designs, and trade networks.22
- 23 Kerr, Wood, 2004.
- 24 Ibid., p. 320.
- 25 Dillon, 1978, 1992.
19The specific example I would like to focus on concerns what I have called “merchants of fire and traders of clay,” in other words, the suppliers of the firewood and clay, the most basic resources without which there would be no porcelain. Firewood was used for bringing the heat inside the large imperial kilns that fired the clay bodies up to temperatures of well over 1,000 degrees centigrade, and maintained it there for several days in a row.23 Kilns located in the northern parts of the empire used coal for firing the kilns, but southern kilns like Jingdezhen relied entirely on firewood.24 In the sixteenth century, the issue of firewood concerned the officials a great deal.25 Firewood was brought into Jingdezhen from the nearby hills, mostly located some way upriver along the Chang. One firing of the largest imperial kilns could take as much as 180 gang of firewood. The term gang refers to the weight one human labourer could carry using carrying poles, and that’s generally assumed to amount to roughly 100 jin or 50 kg. So, 180 gang of firewood indicates a use of 9,000 kg of firewood per firing. It was a major event to fire up the kilns, and the fires would be kept burning over an extended period of several weeks to acquire the right oxygen levels inside the kilns. However, a regular supply of 9,000 kg of firewood would inevitably have a big impact on the local economy, never mind the local environment. There were two types of firewood: supplied by river (wet) and supplied on rafts (dried). These had two different prices, dried wood requiring more labour and time, and thus more expensive.
20The merchants’ involvement centred on tasks like chopping down trees, transporting the trunks to a collection spot, and transporting by river as well as setting aside for drying. There were complaints that suggest the merchants of firewood either sold wet wood as dry or held back the dry wood and demand higher prices. The state responded by seeking to regulate the market, either by purchasing all of the available wood and having kiln supervisors take care of the drying process within the kiln area or paying a set price for wood. The point is not that individual merchants did all these tasks, but like in the kilns themselves, these were connected tasks carried out by merchants of numerous different types fitting together in a chaîne opératoire mode of networked working. Rather than identifying a single type of merchant, or even a single commodity that is traded, we have to look across such a chain that connects the labour and expertise of numerous different workers: the labourers who do the chopping on one end of the chain and the powerful merchants who can negotiate the price of firewood with the imperial kiln overseer, and every merchant in between.
21The same is true for clay. There are two key ingredients in the manufacture of ceramics: the material known in English as kaolin, and porcelain stone. The English word kaolin comes from the Chinese name of the mountain range near Jingdezhen where this material was sourced: Gaoling 高嶺, lit. “high ridge.” The key ingredient is a mineral known as kaolinite, which emerges as a result of the weathering of feldspathic soils. The information that this soft, white clay added an essential ingredient for the making of porcelain was remarked upon by Père d’Entrecolles in the early eighteenth century but known to Chinese potters much earlier. During the Yuan dynasty, the manufacture of large dishes required the elasticity that kaolinite clays provide, but the clay that was naturally rich in kaolinite had become scarce in the surroundings of Jingdezhen, and thus had to be added as an additional ingredient to porcelain stone from then onwards.
22Porcelain stone (cishi 磁石) was the second ingredient, also known as baidunzi 白盾子 in Chinese. Porcelain stone could be found in many parts of the empire, although the colour and quality varied. Jingdezhen’s porcelain stone fired to an especially attractive white, which made Jingdezhen a favoured site, especially for the contrasting wares where that white surface was decorated with cobalt blue. There is a Chinese saying that porcelain stone forms the bones of the porcelain, and kaolin the muscle. Kaolin creates the plasticity while baidunzi forms the core strength of the bones, but one needs need both ingredients to fuse together, which happens when the materials are fired at such high temperatures. While kaolin came from a very specific place, the porcelain stone was sourced from many places scattered throughout Jiangxi Province.
23The supply of clay to the kilns in Jingdezhen involved many different processes and different types of expertise: Knowledge of the geology and the soil; Identification of the quality of the different clays; expertise in digging up the clay (none of this was situated at a very deep level. There was little to no mining involved), purifying the clay but mixing it with water and removing the impurities, grinding the clay to a fine quality, forming small bricks ready for transport, drying the bricks, packing the bricks onto barges, and transporting them to Jingdezhen.
24Of course, some of these tasks happened near Jingdezhen, and more or less under the auspices of the imperial officials assigned to Jingdezhen, but we also know that the nearby supplies ran out, and clay had to be sourced from all over the province as early as the sixteenth century, which in turn required at least some understanding of the above processes or would have relied on an intermediary of some sort to facilitate these processes. The distinction between the imperial kilns and the private kilns is somewhat meaningless here. Of course, the imperial kilns would require the best quality clay, but needed expertise in judging what this best quality clay was when it was purchased from remote locations and transported by merchants who were also supplying the private kilns. It is helpful to think of these labourers, small-scale merchants, larger merchants, intermediaries and so on as part of a chaîne opératoire, not as individual operators.
25So, traders of clay, like the merchants of fire, were an essential component in a wider structure that made the production of porcelain possible. The web that connected these different processes was cast much wider than even the panels and albums illustrating ceramics manufacture suggest. The Mueller plaques start with a single plaque identified on the surface as “mining for clay” (Fig. 3). This is not in fact the clay used for the making of porcelain objects, but for the protective cases, made separately, in which porcelain items are placed inside the kiln. These protective cases, saggers, create a barrier between the porcelain object and the atmosphere in the kiln, in which also fragments of clay or glaze from other items in the kiln could circulate.
Fig. 3. – “Mining for clay,” porcelain plaque (plaque 1 in a series of 17) depicting Jingdezhen porcelain manufacture, c. late nineteenth century
Famille verte palette (diameter 37 cm). Collection Shirley M. Mueller.
- 26 Mueller, 2022, p. 345.
26The image as discussed by Shirley Mueller represents separate steps in the process of mining clay.26 The process of mining for sagger clay is further subdivided into several other processes: digging the sagger clay in the centre of the image, carrying the sagger clay with a pole in the right hand side of the image, and transporting the sagger clay with a trolley in the lower part of the image For the digging, carrying and transporting, further items were required: a hand-held long-handled hammer for breaking up to the surface, poles with baskets attached for carrying the mined substance to another location, where it could be stacked onto a trolley, which also had to be made. All these required separate tasks, materials, and accumulated costs.
- 27 Wang 王宗沐, Lu 陸萬垓, 1597.
27One could add any number of further examples; I will simply mention two here. Both offer indications of how wide the net should be cast to capture all of the elements of trade and how closely trade and production are part and parcel of the same process. Firstly: tools. The kiln complex in Jingdezhen incorporates a large site for the production of tools: pieces of equipment that were important for the production of porcelain. See, for example, the following observation of the manufacturing process, included in an originally sixteenth-century description of the requirements for Jingdezhen’s porcelain manufacture.27
- 28 Translation from Gerritsen, 2020a, p. 158.
Items such as barrows, clay paddles, pails, and knives for cleaning the edges of the ceramic bodies are all made with local iron. They are sturdy and durable, so how could they become unusable overnight? How is it that on the very day on which the firing of the kiln is completed, the kiln supervisors do not account for the implements and materials used during the manufacturing process, the places where they are stored, the damaged ones amongst them and the numbers of pieces worth storing?28
28The source from which this quote is taken is written by and intended for locally based administrators in charge of managing the manufacturing process. That explains the concern for accounting for the tools used and the query about the number of tools and their state of repair: those are ultimately concerns about the cost of production. But the text also makes clear that local resources, iron as well as wood, were used to make the tools required for the manufacture of ceramics. We do not spend much time thinking about it, but these are raw resources that needed to be brought to Jingdezhen from within the region (after all, it is called “local iron”), and probably involved very small-scale traders, but their role is part of the chain, nonetheless, and they too formed part of the supply chain that eventually delivered the imperial ceramics to the court and the export wares on to the European ships.
29Even the smaller supplies of resources, such as the paper used in packaging the goods before transporting them, were quantities that mounted up. This description, taken from the same source, tells us how the smaller pieces of porcelain had to be prepared for transport:
For each set of two bowls, use a small piece of yellow paper. When you have ten pieces [wrapped in yellow paper], you wrap these with one medium-size piece of paper. Each box is packed with 120 small items in total, so you will need 72 sheets of middle- and small-sized paper. If you have more pieces, use more paper, if you have fewer pieces, use less paper.29
30Striking is not just the attempt at micromanagement that shines in this detailed instruction, but also the sheer quantities of paper used. An order of 10,000 pieces would require 6,000 pieces of paper (never mind, of course, the other materials used for boxing up the paper-wrapped pieces of porcelain, such as wadding, glue and fir). Paper had to be brought in via the provincial capital, Nanchang, and cotton for wadding was supplied via Nankang and Jiujiang on the borders of the province. In other words, the porcelain economy was far larger than just Jingdezhen itself, and stretched well beyond the prefecture.
31The brief examples I have provided here can only suggest a perspective rather than conclusively demonstrate anything. The point I have sought to make, however, challenges the widely held view that a single site should be understood as key to technological invention and development. On the whole, in histories of ceramics manufacture in both Europe and China, each type of ceramics is associated with a specific site (or sites) of manufacture. Jingdezhen as the site for the production of blue and white in China, Delft as the site of blue-and-white Delftware, Arita as the site of Japanese porcelain, Antwerp as the site of majolica production, and so on. Of course, the site is important, because of the conglomeration of wealthy investors, talented craftsmen and discerning consumers. Within sites like Bolsward, Delft, Jingdezhen and Arita, innovation and technological transformations of resources could happen because of that conglomeration. However, when we consider the chaîne opératoire seriously, we have to cast the net more widely, and connect the production in one site with the identification, extraction, transport and delivery of natural resources from many others. Like the clays that arrived in Delft from Germany and France, as they did in Jingdezhen from the surrounding counties and prefectures, the transformation started along the way, and was only completed in the manufacture site. This required not only the resources themselves, but also the knowledge of the extractive processes, the value and distinction of the materials, the preservation and preparation, the market, and so on. Each of these processes required skill and know-how, without which the experts located in the manufacture site could not complete the process of manufacture. These groups were showing extended interdependencies, which themselves connected the site of production with a much wider regional space of production.
