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substantive link between the lava expelled by volcanic eruption and the clays redto make porcelain.

Ineffect, in his letters from Jingdezhen, Dentrecolles focused on details of porce-

lain production becausequestions regarding thefundamental nature of theceramicremained well beyond the scienti c understanding of his time. As it turned out,however, those details proved highly instructive. Fascinated by Dentrecolless de-scription of how one piece of pottery passed through the hands of more than sev-enty workers during production, Wedgwood copied the passage into his Com-monplace Book in , and a quarter of a century later he made it the basis forthe organization of his Etruria pottery, the rst industrial establishment foundedentirely on the division of labor and the rst directly to apply the steam engine tomanufacturing. 125

Since Etruria provided the model for the modern factory system, the triumphsof the industrial revolution thus owed something to the potters of Jingdezhen. Inhis mission to make the West competitive with the most renowned works of China,Dentrecolles ultimately proved more successful than he ever could have dreamed.Both his painstaking investigation and the accomplishments of the porcelain city won recognition from Wedgwood. Incorrigibly given to grandiloquent verse, Eras-mus Darwin praised Wedgwoods manufactoryA new Etruria decks Britanniasisleand declared that ancient Etruria rivaled China itself in the antiquity andexcellence of itspottery.126 Wedgwood, however, responded by suggesting that Dar-win read Dentrecolless letters in du Haldes Description. He would learn from theFrench Jesuit that the Chinese employ their art in the formation of works of greatmagni cence such as the building, ornamenting & covering of entire pagodas, & other superb edi ces. Justice should be done, the pottery baron told his old friend,to my distant brethren in the plastic art. 127

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The Creation of PorcelainChina and Eurasia, 2000 . . .1000 . .

Whilea modern-day Dentrecolles certainly would nd it substantially easier to learnabout the history and nature of porcelain, problems of de nition and interpreta-tion still puzzle a newcomer to the subject. A central dif culty is that China andthe West categorize porcelain differently in relation to earthenware and stoneware.Based on a Western taxonomy, the contemporary view regards pottery as encom-passing the three types, ranked according to the wares material composition andthe temperature at which the clay is red. The Chinese, however, have traditionally recognized only two groupings, tao, or earthenware, and ci, which includes bothstoneware and porcelain. The Western classi cation of stoneware and porcelainmakes sense in terms of chemical and physical analysis inasmuch as there are gen-uine differences in mineral ingredients and material formation between the twoceramics; but when the categories are employed in historical narrative, they lead to

considerable confusion. Depending on which modern account one consults, a ma-terial comparable to porcelain emerged in any of the periods of Chinese history from the Zhou to the Yuan, a span of more than two thousand years.

EARTHENWARE, STONEWARE, AND PORCELAIN

Clay generally is associated with substances such as silt and sand, but it actually isdecayed or rotten rock. A ne-grained, earthy material that is plastic when wetand hardens when heated, clay is formed from the breakdown of granite, a coarse-grained igneous rock found mainly in the continental crust. It is a relatively soft,sedimentary composition, a complex, varied substance, not an inert material.Many of its microscopic particles carry a negative electric charge and join in chem-


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ical reactions, a feature that makes it a likely source for the origins of life on Earth,a template or prototype for proteins and nucleic acids. 1

Earthenware, made from many types of clay, forms at between C and

, C; if the temperature is higher than , C, the vessel will bloat and col-lapse in a liquid melt. The red clay, which is red, brown, or buff, is soft and notwholly fused; because it is porous, it must be covered in a second ring with a glaze,essentially a thin layer of glass, to become relatively impermeable. Stoneware is pro-duced at , C to , C, resulting in a product whose hardness lies betweenthat of earthenware and porcelain; it is vitreous, almost nonporous, resonant whenstruck, and varies in color from light gray to black, depending on the amount of iron in the clay. Whiteness and translucency are the chief distinctions betweenporcelainandstoneware. Theporcelainproduced in northern China from theearly seventh century was made from kaolin (china clay), whereas that made at Jing-dezhen at the same time was made from china stone (or porcelain stone, cishi).2

The term kaolin derives from Kaoling (High Ridge), a modest hill northeast of Jingdezhen where miners worked china clay from ancient times. Kaolin not adul-terated with impurities, such as that foundnear Jingdezhen, is scarce.Europeans em-ployed it for pottery fromtheearly eighteenth century, but before that time they usedit chie y for cosmetics and wig powder. Petuntse (or baitunzi, little white bricks),which stems from Chinese potters slang, appears in most descriptions of porcelainas the commercial term for the processed china stone used in the manufacture of porcelain. According to Dentrecolles, potters always had to purify the china stoneshipped to Jingdezhen because from a people who roll little grains of paste in pep-per powder to cover themand thensell themwith real peppercorns, there is no safe-guard from the sale of petunse without it being diluted with some dregs.

From the late thirteenth century, Jingdezhen potters mixed kaolin with chinastone: fusing under heat into a kind of natural glass, china stone gives translucency and hardness to the porcelain paste but is dif cult to work with by itself; kaolin soft-ens the paste, providing plasticity, smoothness, and whiteness. As recognized by

Raumur in the early eighteenth century, the two components combine to form asinglemass when heated to about , C, undergoinga process of vitri cation thatrenders the nished product resonant, wholly impermeable,verywhite,andtranslu-cent when thin. China stone also provides the glaze of Jingdezhen porcelain; mixedwith a bit of lime and wood ash to aid in fusing, it makes for a glassy, rock-solidbond with the clay body. Song Yingxing describes the liquid glaze as having theappearance of a clear rice broth. 3

In the early twentieth century, X-ray crystallography revealed that both kaolinand china stone contain alumina, a mineral oxide that produces microscopically

ne crystals of mullite at high temperature. Referring to little silvery particles thatare sprinkled in thekaolin, Dentrecollesunknowinglyidenti ed grains of mica thatpointed to the presence of the mineral oxide. Chinese potters similarly described

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the clays as sprinkled with spots like stars of silver.4 After William Cookworthy ( ), an apothecary and potter, read Dentrecolless reports in du Haldes Let-tresdiantes in the s, henoted specks glinting in the granite walls of the church

of St. Columb in Cornwall, a clue that contributed to his discovery of deposits of china clay and china stone in that southwestern English county. To the present day Cornish clay mines are bordered by small white mounds made up of the residueleft behind when the two materials were processed. 5

In kaolin and china stone, crystals of mullite are piled up in stacks set at rightangles to other stacks. When heated in a kiln, the crystals glide over one another,extending like shafts into the matrix of the clay, forming a glassy, latticelike struc-ture that fuses the substance. In terms of composition and temperature, kaolin andchina stone red below , C make earthenware; red above , C but below

, C,theyproduce stoneware. Because porcelain is impermeable,glazing merely improves its appearance or protects pigments added between initial ring and nalreturn to the kiln.

The terms proto-porcelain, quasi-porcelain, and porcellaneous stonewareare usedin many modern accounts to identify pottery made with some of the ingredients of porcelain and sharing some of its physical characteristics centuries before theemer-gence of northern porcelain in the Tang dynasty or of Jingdezhen porcelain in theSong period. The long-established Chinese category of ci for high- red pottery (stoneware and porcelain) has the virtue of avoiding such perplexing terminology,albeit at the price of ignoring real distinctions between stoneware and porcelain.

The twoclassi cations of porcelain point toward signi cant differences betweenthe ceramic experiences of China and the West. Stoneware de ned the ceramic his-tory of China for centuriesbefore Tang or Jingdezhenporcelain appeared. Whetherin the early seventh or late thirteenth century, the Chinese grouped porcelain withstoneware inasmuch as the new material resulted from incremental change withinan established tradition, mainly a matter of adjusting the proportion of known in-gredients. And since porcelain vessels, in their solidity, resonance, and imperme-

ability, seemed virtually indistinguishable from stonewares, potters and connois-seurs had good reason to regard the new product as just another, slightly improved variety of ci.

Earthenware de ned the ceramic history of the West until the arrival of Chineseporcelain in the sixteenth century. Northern German stoneware developed late inthe history of European pottery, though it was highly valued, especially in Englandand Holland. At least ten million pieces of the Rhenish pottery entered the port of London between and , just before the deluge of Chinese porcelain began.Thestonewares gained popularity as drinking vessels,pharmacy jars (albarelli), andchamber pots and as nearly impermeable containers for transporting beer, wine,mineral water, mercury, and Dutch gin.

Attractiveandpleasingly decorated, Rhenish stoneware gured in altarpieces by

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Hans Memling (ca. ) and in paintings of peasant festivities by PieterBruegel the Elder ( ) and David Teniers the Younger ( ). Artistsof the Netherlands often featured stoneware jugs in Marian devotional paintings,

showing them lled with owersorembellished with the sacred trigramof the Holy Name of Jesus (De nomine Jhsesu). Dutch taverns served beer in the jugs, and the vessels also found their way into wealthy Dutch households. Floris van Schooten( ) painted A Kitchen Scene (ca. ), which depicts shelves of pewterdishes, blue-and-white porcelain bowls, and potbellied stoneware jugs topped withpewter lids. In Young Woman at Her Toilet ( ), by Gerrit Dou ( ), anermine-draped lady is surrounded by expensive furnishings, including a Persiancarpet, upholstered chairs, a silver-gilded metal pitcher, and a stoneware wine jugresting in a massive cooler of black marble. Still, the spread of stoneware in north-ern Europe from the fourteenth century did not inspire attempts to replicate or an-alyze the product because good, well-glazed earthenware was close to the Rhenishcommodity in price and distinction. Chinese porcelain was a different matter al-together, for Europeans regarded it as superior to their ubiquitous earthenware inall respects.6

Eager to compete with China, Westerners from the late seventeenth centurysoon after porcelains began to arrive in massive quantitiesinvestigated the com-position of theceramic and experimented with formulas that approximatedit. Den-trecolles shared the scienti c mentality on which this enterprise was founded.Observing that the manufacturers of Jingdezhen were ignorant of chemical analy-sis, such as the use of nitric and hydrochloric acids to dissolve solid materials, hedeclares that their inventions [are] all . . . of extreme simplicity. He seems to shareLeibnizs notion that the Chinese were oblivious to the mental abstraction and crit-ical method that are the essence of Western experimental science. He suggests thatby taking the necessary risks and expense of various tests, it might be possible todiscover the art of making with certainty what had once been the consequence of chance. This presages a major thrust of early-twentieth-century research in tradi-

tional industries such as cotton mills, breweries, tanneries, and potteries: that is,investigating the scienti c grounds for practices until then inarticulately embed-ded in traditional handicraftprocedures. 7 Dentrecolles recommends that just as Eu-ropeans might employ experimental techniques to recover the lost secret of mak-ing stained glass, so too perhaps someone in Europe can invent what the Chinesenow do not know about porcelain.

In the service of August II, who nanced what is arguably the rst research-and-development project in history, that is precisely what Tschirnhaus and his associ-ates did in the very years Dentrecolles carried out his investigation in the work-shops of Jingdezhen. Early-nineteenth-century European analysis of the mineraland chemical composition of ceramics resulted in the contemporary classi cationearthenware, stoneware, and porcelain.The category ofstonewareemerged bya kind

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of back-formation: having identi ed the physicalcharacteristics of porcelain, West-ern scientists inescapably recognized those of stoneware as well.

This taxonomic achievement stemmed from European admiration and craving

for chinaware, though lack of that achievement in China reveals little about men-tal abstraction and critical method there. Dentrecolles believed that the potters of Jingdezhen used only rudimentary techniques, yet he actually witnessed them em-ploying some that have a distinctly experimental air, such as producing a compo-nent of copper-oxide glaze by sprinkling water on molten copper and then remov-ing the oxide scale for examination. 8 Dentrecolles describes this procedure in hisletter of , just before he left Jingdezhen for his new post in Beijing. As it hap-pens, pottery experts in the two cities embarked on experimental and systematicstudies of ceramics in the s, leading to innovative techniques that transformedporcelain aesthetics by the introduction of brilliant enamel colors and unusual ef-fects. The Chinese, however, did not focus on the composition of porcelain itself simply because they regarded the material as a natural extension of their ancientcraft of high- red pottery. For their part, Westerners investigated the nature of theceramic because of the novelty, excellence, and expense of the exotic commodity.

TECTONIC PLATES, VOLCANOES, AND YELLOW EARTH

The most striking contrast between China and the West in the history of ceramicsis that the former was more than three thousand years ahead of the latter in themanufacture of high- red wares. The foundation for this precocious achievementlies in the unfathomable past, as far back as the geologic formation of what is now called China.9 The supercontinent of Pangaea, All Earth, began forming mil-lion years ago during the Precambrian, assembled from landmasses riding on tec-tonic plates averaging one hundred kilometers in thickness. When plates meet atsubduction zones, one is pushed beneath the other, with the heat of the collisionmelting the rock to magma. Made relatively uid as a result of being mixed with

gases and water, the magma rises from the base of the upper mantle, or lithosphere,of theEarth,where the temperature is , C,about the ring range of porcelaina conformity that would not have surprised Hutton or Wedgwood.

When magmasurfacesexplosively, volcanoes are born. Morecommonly and lessdramatically, as the magma cools and crystallizes, it forms granite that thruststhrough cracks in the mantle, thereby propelling tectonic plates at an average speedof two centimeters a year, roughly the rate at which ngernails grow. North China(technically, the Sino-Koreancraton) and South China (the Yangzi craton) collidedwith Siberia million years ago, completing the consolidation of the continentsand heaving up the Altai and Tian Shan mountain ranges of Central Asia. 10

As a consequence of their different tectonic heritages, the northern and south-ern parts of China have contrasting topographies and natural resources, a fault line

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also accentuated by climatic divergence. The region of northern Chinathat is, theterritory along the Yellow River and north of the Qinling mountains (or the prov-inces of Shaanxi, Henan, Shanxi, and Hebei)with an average winter temperature

below freezing, became a land of millet, wheat, and sorghum, a central plain of rel-ativephysical simplicity. Southern Chinaencompassing theeast-centralprovincesnear the Yangzi River (Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang)evolved as a jumbled, subtropical region of countless lakes, river-dissected hills, andhighly indented coastline; having an average winter temperature above freezing, itbecame a land of rice, sugar, oranges, and cotton. Boundless elds and carts in thenorth, forested slopes and boats in the south. Much of the history of China may be regarded as a successful human endeavor to extend what tectonic collision setin motionto wield together the disparate areas by deploying a universal writtenscript, a common textual canon, an overarching civil service, and a man-madewaterway (the Grand Canal) linking the two great tributaries that ow from theHimalaya mountains to the Paci c Ocean.

About million years ago,during thedinosaur-dominated periods of themid-dle Mesozoic, huge volcanic eruptions took place in southern China, perhaps as-sociated with westward movement of the Philippine tectonic plate as it slid over theEurasian plate. For millions of years, massive clouds of volcanic dust and cinderspecks periodically shrouded the region, settling out eventually as a sedimentary deposit identical in chemical composition to igneous rock. Compacted over eons,the pale-colored volcanic debris turned into the china stone that became the basisfor the earliest porcelain of southern China. Pulverized by trip-hammers andleached through tanks of water, the stone experiences a simulated weathering thattelescopes epochs into hours. Fired in a kiln, it eetingly reaches toward its pri-mordialorigins as molten lava. A phenomenon of furnace transformation, the whiteporcelain of Jingdezhen is essentially igneous material that has been melted onceagain and then solidi ed into arti cial rock, a substance re-created in human reand shaped to human purposes. 11

Longafter thevolcanoes ofsouthern China stoppedbelching volcanicash,north-ern China received its own accretion of new soil.Some million years ago, mil-lion years after extinction of the dinosaurs by an asteroid, the last great convulsionof the Earths crust began. The bulk of what is now the Indian subcontinent splitaway from Antarctica and headed north, propelled by movement of the Indian-Australian tectonic plate. Thirty-seven million years later, a slow-motion smashuptook place as India plowed into southern Eurasia, raising the Tibetan Plateau andHimalaya mountains, a range of peaks more than three thousand kilometers long.These constitute the youngest and largest uplands on the planet, called the roof of the world since Marco Polo made them known to Europeans in his travel narra-tive. India still drives north today, raising the mountains an average of ten cen-timeters every year, making the region the most dangerous earthquake zone in the

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world. Erosion whittles down the uplift just as inexorably, thereby maintaining thepeaks at a general elevation of ve kilometers above sea level, apparently the max-imum height that mountains can reach on the planet.

The Indo-Eurasian cataclysm had manifold consequences, even proving deci-sive for theevolution of human life.The tectoniccollisiondisplacedsouthern Chinaeastward, farther into the Paci c, and it thrust out what became the great penin-sula of Southeast Asia. The Tibetan Plateau cut off the ow of rain from the south,the in ux of which had nurtured Central Asian grasslands and replenished theTethys Sea, a body of water extending from Europe to East Asia. As the inland seadried up, vast deserts expanded in the rain shadow of the mountains; the regionlost its mild climate and fertile soil, turning into the desolate wasteland that lateraf icted travelers on theSilk Road.The Tibetanupheaval ledto creation of the mon-soon systems of South and East Asia, the colossal natural engines that were unfail-ingly to speed the passage of ships between India and China. The drainage patternof EastAsias great rivers also emerged, with theYellow, Yangzi, Hong,Mekong,andSalween all owing from the ice and snows of the gigantic uplands, separated intheir headwaters by fewer than seventy kilometers and in their ultimate destina-tions in the engul ng sea by thousands.

Formation of the Himalaya mountains and the Tibetan Plateau resulted in cool-ing of the Earth, since exposure of such a huge expanse of bare igneous rockthesize of Texas, California, Montana, and New Mexico combined (or , , squarekilometers)led to removal of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps solarheat, from the atmosphere. Monsoon rains that drench the rock particles producedby tectonic collision and erosion also ush out more carbon dioxide from the at-mosphere, thereby accelerating global cooling. In central Africa, lower planetary temperatures led to shrinking of the rain forest and expansion of savannah grass-lands. Faced with a new and more dif cult environment, tree-dwelling primatesexplored the advantages of walking upright on the plains in search of food, launch-ing the evolution that would culminate millions of years later in their most suc-

cessful descendant, modern Homo sapiens.Cooling of the Earth spawned glaciers up to . kilometers thick that ground up

the continental bedrock in a succession of ice ages. Glacial pulverizing and bothmechanical and chemical weathering of thegranite peaks of CentralAsia producedimmeasurable amounts of loess (from German lss, loose) a yellow rock dust as

ne as our, composed mainly of quartz, a crystalline mix of silicon and oxygen.Some . million years ago, loess began blowing into China from the Central Asiandesert belt, including the Gobi, blanketing the highlands of the north during longperiods of desiccation, nally burying the luxuriant forest of the broad continen-tal plain and its clay-rich surface. Carried southeast on winter winds from Mon-golia, the quartz powder forms a layer as much as three hundred meters deep inplaces, the thickest topsoil on the planet.

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Loess, known in China as huangtu (yellow earth), is the sediment that gives theYellow River (Huang He) its name and turns it into the muddiest waterway in theworld:at times asmuch asa third of its mass is silt, and a tributary oncewas recorded

as reaching almost twice that.12

This is re ected in the Chinese adage that the wa-ters of the Yellow River becomeclear only once in a thousand years. The river, Ricciremarks,hasno respect forChinese lawandorder, frequently ravagingwhole dis-tricts when it breaks its loess banks, seemingly changing its course at will. 13 Unlikethe Yangzi, the Yellow River is navigable for only a short distance from its mouth,making it a dismal channel for trade and communication. Pouring out over a bil-lion tons of silt every year, the river saturates the Yellow Sea with its ocher deposit.

An exceptionally fertile soil by virtue of its capacity to x atmospheric nitrogenand bring up mineral nutrients by capillary action, loess provided the agriculturalbasis for the emergence of civilization in northern China, despite the sparse vege-tation of the central plain. Millet agriculture supported a population of four hun-dred per square kilometer, and the high productivity of cereal farming gave rise toa host of independent, small-scale cultivators, the tax base of all future centraliz-ing bureaucracies. To some extent, China owed its lack of feudal magnates and itsperennial imperial integration to the rich topsoil swept in from Central Asia. Fit-tingly, as early as the Zhou period, the Middle Kingdom itself came to be symbol-ized by a yellow dragon, and writers described the Yellow River as owing with thesupple motion of a mighty dragon.

Potters in ancient China placed their workshops in loess deposits, and tens of millions of Chinese to the present day, notwithstanding calamitous earthquakes,live in roomy caves carved out of cliffs of yellow earth. Loess comprises the bulk of the raw materialused in makingtheseven thousand life-sized, unglazed terra-cotta(earthenware) statues of warriors and horses buried in the famed mausoleum of Qin Shihuang, the rst emperor of China. Around the same time, laborers con-structed the rst sections of what came to be known as the Great Wall from arammed-loess foundation faced with bricks of red loess. Centuries later, in the

reign of the Ming, loess gave its tint to the yellow tiles on the roofs of the imperialForbidden City in Beijing, and of cials used yellow pottery for rituals at the Altarof the Earth.

By itself, because it is dif cult to shape, loess has limited use as a pottery ma-terial; but after being washed by water over millennia, it becomes more malleableas a result of increments of clay. Kaolin, sedimentary clay washed out from gran-ite rock and often found in association with loess, proved most useful for makingpottery. As early as the Neolithic, artisans mined suitable clays, establishing theirkilns where the loess layer was thinnest so they could gain ready access to the un-derlying kaolin. That clay became the material basis for the white vessels of theShang, and for more than a thousand years, northern potters shaped it into high-

red wares.14

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POTTERY AND METALLURGY IN CHINA

Employment of loess determined thedevelopment of Chinese pottery in theBronze

Age ( . . .).15

Since it consists mainly of quartz, loess has a high melt-ing point, making it excellent material for constructing high-temperature kilns. Inaddition, the low clay content of loess means that it does not shrink during dryingand ring, thereby proving ideal for making ceramic piece molds for castingbronze ritual vessels, the artistic masterworks of the Shang era. The shapes of the vessels usually came from pottery, though the designs they boreanimal heads,imaginary beasts, a pattern of whorlsgenerally appeared in low relief or incisedrather than as painted decoration. A common motif was the taotie, a mystifying,masklike face of a creature with horns, bulging eyes, and gnarly mouth. 16 Potters

carved theornament on clay molds, sometimes on as manyas eleven separate piecesfor cauldrons (ding), large round vessels standing on three legs. Artisans assembledthe pieces around a claycoreand poured in moltencopperand tin to form the metal vessel; after they pried off the clay sections, they polished the bronze. The excellentconsistency and minimal shrinkage of the loess molds ensured that the nal prod-uct preserved its meticulous embellishment.

Retaining their shape under intense heat, the molds made possible the creationof bronze pieces of superb quality, characterized by detailed ornament, dense pat-terns, andcomplex interlocking forms.Used as ceremonial, feasting andburial uten-sils, the bronze containers were objects of desire and distinction. As items centralto status assertion as well as ritual order, royal courts controlled their manufacture,and their possession signi ed high rank and political authority. The Shang tombof Fu Hao, a consort of King Wu Ding (ca. . . .), held a treasure of morethan bronze objects, including wine goblets, along with pottery, carved ivory, jade jewelry, a lacquered cof n, and , cowry shells.17 Improvements in smelt-ing in the Spring and Autumn period of the Eastern Zhou led to large-scale pro-duction of bronzes; archaeological excavation of a single foundry has unearthed

tens of thousands of molds.The ritual vessels had a substantial in uence on the history of Chinese art andculture, a heritage of the Bronze Age that remained vigorous until the fall of theQing dynasty in the early twentieth century. In . . . workers digging a pitdiscovered a bronze cauldron, reportedly enveloped in a supernatural, shimmer-ing mist as it came to light. When scholar-of cials presented the vessel to the em-peror, they explained that in antiquity there existed only one divine Ding -cauldron,which became the model for the actual bronzes employed in imperial ceremonieshonoring Heaven, Earth, and sacred spirits. 18 In some measure, then, all ancientding shared in the auspicious natureof this elementalcauldron, endowing themwithawesome prestige. From the Han through the Qing, emperors collected ding andother ancient bronzes since they regarded the vessels as embodying the legendary

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past, spiritual power, and political legitimacy. In turn, potters traded on the repu-tation of the bronzes, for as early as the Shang they copied the metal pieces in theirown medium.

As a consequence of innovations in metallurgy, ceramics,which hadenjoyed thehighest status for ritual and funerary purposes during the Neolithic, lost rst placeto bronze objects during the Shang. 19 And when wares in gold and silver came intowider use in the Han, pottery took second place to them as well. Still, its capacity for skeuomorphic reproduction rescued pottery from being relegated to the cate-gory of mere utilitarian crockery. By simulating costly metal wares in clay, pottersbrought preferred shapes, hues, and ornament within reach of prosperous socialgroups outside the royal courts. During the Shang, artisans replicated bronze con-tainers in earthenware and stoneware, with glazes that mimicked the patina onbronzes and with spiral patterns that roughly imitated the dragon designs on them.In theWarringStatesperiod,ceramic surrogates of ritualbronzes gainedwidespreadacceptance among the upper stratum as mingqi (radiant artifacts), tomb furnish-ings for the spirits of the dead. Inasmuch as a bronze vessel cost the equivalent of a workers income for two years, a clay substitute had obvious attractions, in partic-ular when the economy went downhill. That was the case in the period of disunity following the fall of the Han empire in . .: bronze production plummeted,and glazed vessels took on a broader role in privileged households. 20

Employment of loess for ceramic molds meant that pottery and metallurgy developed together in China. The same individuals certainly labored as both bronzecasters and potters since each craft depended on the other. Until the molten cop-per and tin actually owed into a mold, potters controlled almost all stages of pro-duction of the bronzes. As a result, effective kilns, clay molds, and ceramic artistry stimulated high-temperature smelting, bronze casting, and imitation of pottery forms in bronze. In western Eurasia and elsewhere, workers rst made metal objects with a hammer and anvil as part of a smithy tradition. Hammering metal, how-ever, was not a traditional Chinese technique. Rather, China stood out among cul-

tures in that its earliest metalartifacts emerged froma ceramic context, with bronze vessels modeled on pottery and with ceramic molds determiningthe shape and em-bellishment of bronze implements.

This established a signi cant technological pattern: the reciprocal relationshipof ceramics and metallurgy continued long past the Bronze Age. Increasingly pow-erful smelting ovens encouraged the development of kilns for making high- redpottery in northern China by the late Shang. By . . . greatly improved fur-naces led to the use of iron, which melts at , C, higher than copper ( , C)or tin ( . C). Most signi cantly, Chinese craftsmen relied on their long expe-rience with mold technology to produce iron: they made cast ironheating andpouring the metal into molds, as with bronzerather than wrought iron, as in the

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smithy tradition everywhere else. While casting techniques are more wasteful of the ore than hammering, China possessed plentiful iron. It also had reserves of coalto fuel furnaces when northern China became largely deforested during the Tang.

Cast-iron manufacture had enormous rippling effects in many parts of the Chi-nese economy, especially in forest clearance, farming, engineering,mining, andsaltproduction. Using ceramic molds, ironmasters forged thin pans (for evaporatingbrine), axes, plowshares, chains, hoes, saws, pots, and armaments generations be-fore the beginning of the common era. In the early Tang, the notorious sovereign-empress Wu (r. ), an enthusiastic sponsor of Buddhism, ordered con-struction ofa three-storypagoda ofcast iron, toppedbya towering cast-iron phoenix(her symbol) sheathed in gold plate. During the Northern Song ( ),builders erected an iron pagoda in Kaifeng, thirteen stories ( fty-four meters) highand clad in glazed tiles. In the eleventh century, coke, a solid residue obtained fromcoal, fueled blast furnaces in northern China, raising output of cast iron to over

, metric tons a year. The state armaments industry of the Song equipped anarmy of onemillion men with iron weapons, includingspears, arrowheads, swords,and body armor. Europe did not use such large amounts of cast iron until ve cen-turies later. 21

A mutually reinforcing relationship between potters and metal-smiths, coupledwith natural resources of rst-rate ceramic materials, coal, and iron ore, gave Chinaa key advantage over other regions of the ecumene. Civilizationas de ned by theappearance of cultivated plants, domestic livestock, village settlements, formal re-ligious cults, writtenscript, and territorialpolities rst came into existence around

. . . in Sumerian temple communities on the lower Tigris and EuphratesRivers in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq).Within a fewcenturies,Sumerian-Akka-dian villagers had names for ceramic vessels, and guilds of potters used mass-production techniques. 22 In contrast, China came relatively late to civilization, forthe same set of de ning breakthroughs did not appear on the Yellow River untilmore than two thousand years after the Mesopotamian achievements.

Since some communication took place across the breadth of Central Asia longbefore the advent of recorded history, it is unclear which of those breakthroughsto civilization in China resulted from Mesopotamian in uence and which wereindigenous developments. In any event, China swiftly surged past the accom-plishments of Southwest Asia in ceramics and metallurgy as a consequence of theremarkable fashion in which the two technologies reinforced and stimulated eachother. Although several considerations, including relative geographical isolationand early imperial uni cation, set China on a unique trajectory among Eurasiancivilizations, the millennia-long symbiosis of clay and metal contributed substan-tially to the triumphs of China so much admired and coveted by Leibniz and hiscontemporaries.

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THE CREATION OF TANG PORCELAIN:POTTERY FROM THE BRONZE AGE TO THE TANG

Over the course of centuries, a pro cient kiln technology emerged from the com-bination of loess soil, the early predominance of ceramics in metallurgy, and con-siderable experience developing furnaces for making pottery, bronze, and iron. 23

No matter what sort of clay goes into making a vessel, if the kiln does not reach asuf ciently high temperature it merely will turn out earthenware. According to Pic-colpasso, Italian potters look on the manner of making the kiln as an importantsecret and say that in this consists the whole art of creating superior wares. 24 Of course, Chinese potters sharedthesame perspective. They had theadvantage, how-ever, of more ef cient and durable kilns than those of Southwest Asia. The clays of that region have poor refractory properties, ring adequately in the , to

, C range but melting above , C. This limitation contributed to early Mesopotamian and Egyptian potters modeling their kilns on smelting furnaces, inwhich the smithy strives to keep metal and fuel in close contact with each other.They built furnaces of brick from the ground up, squat bottlelike structures with

reboxes directly beneath the pots, a technology thatproduced a uniform but mod-est temperature.

Potters achieve the best results, however, by separating vessels from the sourceofheat in the kiln. In China, they had long experience with refractoryclays in build-ing furnaces, and their downdraft kiln served as the model for the reverberatory furnace used for making cast iron, in which ames are de ected downward fromthe roof on the metal. Artisans employed loess soil to buildsuchfurnaces: they sim-ply excavated a chamber in rising ground, tamped the walls, and dug a vent to thesurface; an effective chimney gave a good draft and strong ame. Chinese pottershad the additional bene t that their heat-resistant kilns could handle at least sixty

rings before needing repairs, whereas those of Southwest Asia could notwithstandmuch more than a dozen because of their construction from clays readily damaged

by high temperature.From early times,Chinese kilnbuilders put their structures partlyunderground,

using the quartz-rich soil to provide ef cient insulation. The small, boxy kilns of theNeolithic period reached C,about the temperatureobtained byputting raw wares in a bon re, the earliest means of baking clay; at that heat only porous earth-enware can be produced. 25 As early as the Shang, however, kilns achieved temper-atures of , C, well within the range at which stoneware forms. In the WarringStates period, northernkilns partially built intohillsides of loess soil took on a horse-shoe shape, with two chimneys side by side, and red as high as , C, the tem-perature at which porcelain ingredients fuse. In the lower Yangzi region during theZhou era, dragon kilns (longyao)used the slope of hills to produce a natural draftthat raised the ring temperature higher than European furnaces could obtain be-

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fore the nineteenth century. Resembling a radically inclined chimney, the multi-chamber tube relied on the use of downdraft circulation, with re at the mouth of the kiln preheating the air rising in the structure. Zhou potters red stoneware at

temperatures of , to , C and exported them as luxury items from theYangzi valley to theregion of theYellowRiver. BytheSong period, thelargest dragonkilns of southern China stretched up slopes as much as meters, at a -degreeangle, and could re tens of thousands of porcelains simultaneously.

At Jingdezhen toward the end of the Mingdynasty, the egg-shaped kiln (zhenyao)cameinto extensive use.Potters called it thatbecause they thought it resembled half an egg lying on its side, though Tang Ying saw the oven as evocative of a tipped-over water jar. The switchfromthedragon kiln stemmed from thinning timbersup-plies in the vicinity: since the egg-shaped furnace heats up rapidly and is excep-tionally well insulated, it requires less fuel than the dragon kiln, making it cheaperto use. Described by Dentrecolles as typically thirty-six meters high and seventy-three meters long, the egg-shaped kiln red various types of wares and glazes atdifferent temperatures in a single operation. Perhaps bringing to mind his own ex-perience,Dentrecolles tellshis readers that the arch of the kiln is thick enough thatone can walk on it without being troubled by the re inside.

Many pages of Dentecolless letters concentrate on glazes, an aspect of pottery technology that depended on employmentof sophisticated kilns.His report ofis devoted almostentirely to recipesfor glazes, surelybecause hegrasped thatFrenchpotters could more easily replicate thesurface coatings of porcelain than they couldits clay fabric. High- red glazes rst appeared in China in the Yangzi basin duringthe Bronze Age, fully three thousand years before Europeans started applyingthem. 26 Wood-fueled kilns develop a coating of ash glaze when red to tempera-tures needed to makestoneware; someof it falls on thevessels being red, producinga blotchy, uneven veneer. Glaze crystals also form on the wares themselves, an ef-fect augmented as kilns grow larger and cooling takes longer. In all likelihood, pot-ters as early as the Shang noticed these phenomena and thereafter deliberately

sought to replicate and manipulate glazes during kiln operations.In the Han period ( . . . . .), potters added lead to glazes as a ux,

that is, to lower the temperatureat which the glaze is red. This was a turning pointin technology, for when iron-oxide pigments were covered by the lead glaze, colorsappeared bright and clear on the smooth, re ective surface of the red vessel. Leadglazes thus encouraged increased recourse to painted decoration, a hallmark of Tangceramics. Excellent glazes on Chinese porcelain help account for the extraordinary success and prestige of the commodity; they enabled the potter skillfully to imitatemetalwork and gemstonesurfaces, to create a variety of shades reminiscent of othersubstances, such as jade, bronze, and tinted lacquer, and to paint vessels with pre-cisely delineated, polychrome adornment.

Such artistry depended on comprehensive knowledgeand control of ring tech-

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niques, especially regulating the amount of oxygen in the kiln. In reducing condi-tions (i.e., with restriction of oxygen during ring), grayish bodies and cool (orbluish green) tones dominate in the red clay; in oxidizing conditions (with ample

oxygen), brownish bodies and warm (or yellowish) shades dominate.27

Tang pot-ters accidentally discovered the effect of various kiln atmospheres, and Song arti-sans later developed techniques to control the process more surely. It all called forremarkable ingenuity and pro ciency, however. Without precise measuring tools,potters had to learn by trial and error how to gauge oxygen levels in the kiln to pro-duce desired hues on the red vessel while simultaneously taking account of how the temperature affects glaze viscosities, assorted pigments, and the clay itself. AsDentrecolles emphasized, making porcelain was an exceptionally volatile, costly business as substantial wastage invariably occurred when potters aimed for subtleand complex effects employing large kilns and high temperatures.

Given the natural resources Chinese potters had available, from loess soil tokaolin clay tochina stone,creationofporcelain by the Tang period would havebeenimpossible without prolonged experimenting with raw materials, improving fur-nace design, developing glazing techniques, and learning how to manage the kilnenvironment. The achievement also owes much to the existence of the large num-ber of pottery centers that sprang up as China slowly recovered from the fall of theHan empire in . . From then to the rise of the Sui dynasty in , imperialChina fractured into several petty kingdoms, the north fell into the hands of no-madic invaders, and multiple disastersdrought, oods, and epidemicsresultedin population decline. Scores of refugees ed the north, including potters, some of whom rebuilt their workshops just south of the Yangzi River. With recovery of theeconomy and centralized political control under the Sui and Tang dynasties, pot-tery manufacturers ourished as never before, contending for business within agrowing domestic market, producing wares for new export clients, and strugglingto win the all-important patronage of the imperial court.

In the Tang, kiln complexes cropped up in at least fourteen provinces (and fty

counties), ve times the number of centers that existed in the Sui period, with mostmanufacturers producing an assortment of wares. 28 Intense competition placed apremium on the purest clay, the silkiest glaze, the stylish shape, the gleaming color,the innovative embellishment. As was always the case, potters quickly adoptedthat is, spied out and copiedthe best practices of their rivals, thereby impellingoverall ceramic standards to higher levels. It is not surprising that porcelain, pre-pared for by two thousand years of craftsmanship, rst appeared during the reignof the Tang.

A transformation in Chinas relationship to Eurasianculture also spurred theul-timate transition to porcelain in the early seventh century. During the Sui period,merchants began importing Southwest Asian commodities to China in unprece-dented amounts. Silver vessels from the eastern Mediterranean and Persia ranked

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among the most prized merchandise, eagerly embraced at the imperial court andreproduced by Chinese artisans in bronze and lacquerware. Novel and appealing,the silver objects and their Chinese counterparts became models for the ceramic

industry within a generation. Northern Tang potters copied the pale shades, slen-der bodies, and lobed shapes of silver ewers, bowls, and dishes.29

Of course, they employed kaolin as their primary clay, a mineral substance thatsatis ed all the requirements for such replication since it red a striking white,shaped to netolerances, and withstood the hottest portion of the kiln without melt-ing. Tang potters thus created the rst true porcelain, a new material that never-theless emerged naturally, all but invisibly, from the long evolution of high- redpottery, inspired at the last moment by new cultural forces linking China to the restof the ecumene.

YELLOW CHINA AND BLUE CHINA:LAND AND SEA IN EAST AND WEST

Extensivecultural contactwith western Eurasia representedonly oneaspect of wide-spread change in early Tang China ( ). Based on Sui precedents, the Tangmodestly extended the system of staf ng government posts by examinations basedmainly on Confucian texts, one of the Chinese practices most admired by Euro-pean philosophes a thousand years later. Another Sui achievement, building theGrand Canal to connect the basins of the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers, became equally important in time. At its greatest extent in the fourteenth century, the Grand Canalattained a length of , kilometers (or roughly the driving distance from New York City to Memphis, Tennessee). In contrast, the largest such undertaking in Eu-rope was the Canal de Languedoc, a waterway of kilometers, completed into connect the Mediterranean to the Atlantic by slicing through southwesternFrance. InEngland, the canal linking the Trentand MerseyRivers, built in the decadeafter and running past the front gates of Etruria Hall, Wedgwoods Geor-

gian-style country housewas acclaimed by patriots as the Eighth Wonder of theWorld. 30 Making possible a barge journey from Hull on the North Sea to Liver-pool on the Irish Sea, with a canal connection running down the Severn River tothe Bristol Channel, it stretched for kilometers, only percent the length of theGrand Canal.

Chinas new man-made river functioned as the vital artery by which the surplusrice of the south reached the center of power in Changan (Xian), the capital of theTang dynasty in the northwest. The grain fed Changans population of one million,as well as armies guarding the frontier against nomadic attack. By the eighth cen-tury, the lower Yangzi region had emerged as the indispensable granary of the em-pire: the riches and resourcefulness of the south secured the bureaucrats and bul-warks of the north. Ricci records that thesouthern provincesprovide theKing with

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everything needed or wanted to live well in the unfertile province of Pekin [Beijing]:fruit, sh, rice, silk cloth for garments, and six hundred other things, all of whichmust arrive on a xed day.31 Using a simile already commonplace for centuries, a

Ming of cial declared that the Grand Canal may be likened to a mans throat. If food cannot be swallowed for a single day, death ensues atonce. 32 At the sametime,the waterway also bene ted southern China: it lowered transport costs by per-cent for agricultural and manufactured products. Porcelain from Jiangxi featuredamong the earliest merchandise carried north on barges on the Grand Canal.

Ingeneral, theMiddleKingdomexperienced chronic tension between theforcesof what has been called yellow China and blue China. 33 In simpli ed terms, theformer stood for the Yellow River, the Great Wall, agrarian predominance, conti-nental priorities, a command economy, Confucian bureaucracy, and disregard forthe maritime world; the latter signi ed the lower Yangzi, a market economy, localself-suf ciency, cultural interaction, long-distance trade,andorientation to thesea.Fear of marauding pastoral nomads in the north made for a static frontier, sweptby loess windsand crisscrossed bycamel caravans. The south contended with a uidfrontier, with Tang administrators and merchants moving into the hot lands of Guangdong, Guangxi, and northern Vietnam. As a northern writer observed afterthe fall of the Han dynasty, the south is a distant place with different customs, andthe climate is not the same.34 In the late thirteenth century, Marco Polo looked onnorthern and southern China as virtually separate kingdoms, the latter calledManziand the former Cathay.

If construction of the Grand Canal had never taken place, an enduring blueChina might have emerged in the south, an independent state that could havereached out to encompasscoastal Vietnam and partsof insular Southeast Asia, areasbound together by a common maritime orientation and commitment to long-dis-tance exchange. The Chinese elite, however, remained focused on command fromthe north and on a continental point of view. 35 For them, the sea signi ed the mer-chants realm, dominated by men given over to pro t rather than to principle or

position; it stood for the alien and the ungovernable, viewed with apprehensionand to be shunned whenever possible. The VOC and the EIC had limited culturalin uence in Asia before the late eighteenth century because of unbreakable ties totheir metropolitan countries and the unrelenting focus of the merchants on real-izing earnings for their companies and shareholders. Seagoing Chinese merchantshad limited cultural in uence abroad because Chinese of cialdom regarded themas loosening ties to their metropolitan country in the service of an unseemly focuson garnering pro t. As a consequence, the Asian Mediterranean, encompassingthe expanse from the South China Sea to the Gulf of Siam, played a limited role inthe Chinese worldview. 36

In contrast, western Asia always had a pronounced maritime outlook. For

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Mesopotamian empires, control of the Persian Gulf and access to the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean were crucial for commercial prosperity andstate security. For an-cient Egypt, Phoenicia, and Greece, the eastern Mediterranean represented a high-

way of tradeand a cockpitofwar, considerations that impelledkingdomsand coastalcity-states to maintain harbors and nance eets. For Rome, the whole of the Medi-terranean bound the empire together: it provided for the movement of troops, aswell as for indispensable, never-ending relays of grain- lled galleys from the Nileto Italy. More than anything else, control of the Mediterranean accounts for impe-rialRomes exceptional stabilityandresilience, making it thegreatest of all Iron Ageempires of the West. The countries of northwestern EuropePortugal, Spain,France, Holland, and Englandsucceeded to this maritime legacy inasmuch as they looked out on the Atlantic and traded by water with the Mediterranean.

In the West, then, commerce, war, and the sea were entwined from birth. Co-lumbus brought the traditions of the Mediterranean and theAtlantic together inas-much as he was a native of the port of Genoa, spent many years in Portugal, ap-pealedfor nancial backing fromEuropean monarchs, and made his great discovery by voyaging across the Ocean Sea. As warrior-merchants serving trading empires,themen of theVOC and EIC hearkened back to institutions and perspectives forgedin Genoa and Venice,most conspicuously a lethal joining ofwarfare to trade,powerto pro t.37 The VOC followed a policy of coophandel met force (trade by force of arms).38 In an English governor of Bombay counseled the directors of the EICof the need for sea power to prevent Indian monarchs from controlling commerce:if no naval force, no trade, if no fear, no friendship.39 According to Ricci, whenPortuguese ships reached the ports of southern China in the early sixteenth cen-tury, Chinese customs of cials expressed alarm at the cannon they carried and atthe swift recourse to violence of Portuguese commanders determined to win ac-cess to trade.40 The of cials at rst opposed allowing the foreigners entrance to thekingdom, though they soon gave way before the lure of illicit pro t. In this en-counter, Confucian bureaucrats and Western mariners represented their respective

traditions, theformer oriented toward continental, land-based centers of power, thelatter toward maritime enterprise backed by armed force.

Ricci believed that a difference in character distinguished the two great regionsof China: The northern Chinese are morewarlike and courageous than thosefromthe south but less alert mentally. The claim made its way into Montesquieus Spirit of Laws, which drew heavily on du Haldes compilation of Jesuit reports: Thepeoples of northern China are more courageous than those of the south. 41 Indeed,even the Chinese recognized an age-old contrast between northern martial valorand southern commercial acumen (or avarice). Still, tensions between yellow andblue China relaxed in the early phase of the Tang dynasty, with administrators inthe north and merchants in the south nding common ground. For the rst and

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last time, blue China came to clear dominance during the Southern Song period( ), when nomadic conquest of the north resulted in the capital and courtbeing relocated to the city of Hangzhou, just south of the Yangzi.

Building the Grand Canal extended both imperial control and Chinese cultureto the south, a vast region that began to be incorporated into what is now calledChina only from the time of the Han. From the Tang period to the eleventh cen-tury, the population soared, increasing by over percent. 42 Migration from thenorth during the post-Han troubles, coupled with expansion of crop cultivationthereafter, especially of more productive strains of rice, explains the demographicexplosion, while the latter sheds light on the increasing importance of maritimedealings in the southern provinces fromthe Tang through the Song. The hillycoastalprovinces of Fujian and Guangdong are hemmed in by mountains, resulting in acongested environment that effectively oriented the population to the sea. Xie Li,a Quanzhou of cial and poet of the thirteenth century, described the problems andopportunities of the area:

The Quanzhou population is dense.The mountains and valleys are barren.The people want to till, but there is no land to open up.To the south lies the ocean, vast and limitless.Every year they build ships and go to foreign lands.43

Inhabitants of the coast turned to the sea in one capacity or another: they cultivated foodstuffs for export (sugar, wine, salt, wheat our), made export merchan-dise (pottery, paper, silk, iron wares), imported foreign goods (pearls, sapanwood,sulfur, coral, king sher feathers, Indian cotton cloth), and even migrated to Chi-nese settlements in Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, and maritime Southeast Asia. Mer-chants in China shippedpickledplums and lychee nuts to maritimeSoutheast Asia,metal utensils and sides of cured pork to India, silk fabric and porcelains to Japanand Persia. A Song scholar observed that the entire province of Fujian makes its

living by the practice of seaborne commerce.44

Merchant shipping and overseas trade increased considerably during the early Tang; Canton and Quanzhou emerged as important ports for the rst time. A vis-itor to Canton recorded seeing unknown numbers of Indian, Persian, South Seaand other boats, laden with incense, drugs,and precious things piled up like moun-tains.45 The rise of Buddhism in China from the rst centuries . . fostered tradein aromatic woods and other forest products of Southeast Asia needed for religiousceremonies.46 During the Tang, however, trade shifted to spices from the Moluc-cas and pepper from India. As luxury products, the Buddhist commodities madefor handsome proceeds when transported on ships of slight tonnage; but pepperhad a low value-to-volume ratio, which meant carrying it in bulk on larger shipsresulted in higher pro ts. As a consequence of the advantages obtained from econ-

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omy of scale, sizable Chinese junks came to dominate trade to India after the ninthcentury, displacing smaller vessels from theIndian Ocean. This would be especially lucrative for the pottery industry.

Chinese seaborne enterprise during the Tang met with a similar impulse fromSouthwest Asia.47 The rulers of Sassanian Persia ( ) promoted trade in theIndian Ocean and farther east, as far as Sri Lanka for the collection of silk, spices,and sandalwood. The Arab ruling class that conquered and replaced the Sassani-ans in the seventh century pursued a similar commercial policy. Proclaimed in ,theoutward-looking Tang dynasty coincided with thefoundationof Muslim powerin Arabia in the time of the Prophet Muhammad (ca. ). Arab-Muslim con-quest of Iraq ( ), the Levant ( ), Mesopotamia ( ), Egypt ( ), and Persia( ) recon gured the Southwest Asian trading zone, uniting a region previously divided by language, religion, and warring empires. Ships from Southwest Asia be-gan arriving in Canton in the eighth century, and large numbers of Arabs and Per-sians settled in the city. During the early period of the Abbasid dynasty ( ),Persian vessels made high pro ts taking goods on the , -kilometer round-tripto China. A diaspora of Muslim merchants from Southwest Asia in the entreptsof the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, and China later would prove crucial for thedevelopment of Jingdezhen blue-and-white porcelain.

The Tang dynasty, however, traced its descent from Turkic-Mongol peoples of Central Asia, so the imperial court in Changan showed more interest in northerncaravans than in southern argosies. Indeed, the early Tang period witnessedthe mostextensive cultural and political contacts between Southwest Asia and China beforeestablishment of theMongol empire some ve hundred years later. TheEasternMar-ket of Changan displayed merchandise from all provinces of the Middle Kingdom;the Western Market featured goods from Central Asia and Southwest Asia, as wellas six Zoroastrian and Manichaean temples. 48

Central Asianartisans fashioned vessels in silver andcarved gurines from jade.Southwest Asian entrepreneurs imported purple-dyed woolen cloth from Syria,

deep-pile carpets from Persia, rock crystal from Samarqand, and lapis lazuli fromthe mountains of northern Afghanistan. A thousand precious items buried nearChanganin suggest the scaleand variety of the caravan trade: the hoard includedcoral, gold dust, fabrics, Sassanian coins, silverwork, Baltic amber, and blocks of jade.49 The goods may havebeen carried to ChanganbySogdians, perhaps the mostnumerous Southwest Asianresidents of the city. Many came from Samarqand, a city in the region the Romans called Transoxiana (now mainly Uzbekistan and Tajik-istan). A Tang chronicler noted that Sogdians excel at commerce and love pro t[and] . . . they go wherever there is pro t. 50 Sogdian merchants calculated prices insilver ingots and copper-cash, quantities of which they carried to Transoxiana. Sig-ni cantly, sabao, the name of the Tang of ce appointed to supervise foreigners, de-rives,byway of theSogdian language, from a Sanskrit term meaning caravan leader.

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THE SILK ROAD: CHINA ANDSOUTHWEST ASIA IN THE TANG

Pottery statues of two-humped Bactrian camels gureamong theparaphernalia de-posited in Tang tombs, alongwith ceramic models ofdogs, horses,houses, and gran-aries. The pieces commonly are painted yellow, green, and brown. Depicted withlively realism and dramatic movement, the camels bear sacks of merchandise andcooking equipment. Pilgrim asks and haunches of meat dangle from the saddles,provisions for the dead on their ultimate journey. Some of the camels improbably carry eight-man orchestras playing stringed instruments and woodwinds; dwarfsand jugglers cavort on others. Familiar animals in northern China for hundreds of years, camels are represented in mortuary sculptures as far back as the fourth cen-tury . . . In Central Asia, a winged camel symbolized good fortune, and by thetime of the Han, the Chinese regarded the beasts in the same way because of therich cargoes they brought from distant lands. 51 But whatever their original spiri-tual function, the Tang pottery camels inescapably evoke the caravan trade of theSilk Road.

Camels travel no faster than four kilometers an hour, so journeying on the Silk Road meant a long, grueling trek through the desiccated heart of Asia. 52 Caravansof camels and carts departed from Changan, passed through the long corridor of Gansu province, and trudged west to skirt the southern edge of the Gobi Desert,where a line of modest Chinese towns serviced travelers. At Dunhuang, the routesplit into northern and southern passages around the Taklimakan desert of theTarim basin, a stony badlands between the Tian Shan to the north and the Kunlanrange of the Tibetan Plateau to the south. Bleak and cruel, the terrain took many lives; travelers stacked up the bleached bones of animals as landmarks. Most caravans took the northern route, which passed by fewer sand dunes and salt crusts,relics of the primeval inland sea. On the southern route, steep mountain trails ledby way of Tibet and Nepal into the Ganges valley of northeastern India.

Here and there along the Silk Road, the greenery of crops and pastureland, thelegacy of glacial runoff and loess soil, relieved the desolation of rock and sand. Aseries of polyglot oasis communitiesincluding Turfan, Kucha, Aksu, Khotan,and Cherchenlived off the passing caravans. They were not merely neutral way-stations for travelers, however, for their residents acted as cultural brokers, adaptingmaterial objectsand religious ideas,aswell asornamentaldesigns and symbols,which

ltered in from the great centers of agrarian civilization. On his sixteen-year, round-trip journey to India, Xuanzang (ca. ), a famous and in uential Buddhistmonk, received hospitality in Silk Road settlements from Uighur (Turkic) khans andwarlords. Ofcourse, his fellow monkswelcomedhim aswell. Inthe Kuchaareaalone,some one hundred Buddhist monasteries with ve thousand monks offered lodgingto travelers while also serving them as banks, storehouses, and caravanserais. 53

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The two tracks of the Silk Road joined again at Kashgar, the point at which pil-grims such as Xuanzang headed south through the towering peaks of the Pamirsand the Hindu Kush to the Buddhist shrines and reliquaries (stupas) of India. The

main route, however, continued west through Transoxiana to the prosperous me-tropolis of Samarqand, from which paths ran southwest to Persia and west toMesopotamia. After crossing theTigrisandEuphrates Rivers, a relatively short jour-ney brought the camel-weary traveler to the Levant or Egypt. The trek from west-ernmost China to ports on the eastern Mediterranean traversed some , kilo-meters, a distance covered at no more than kilometers a day. Polo may havecounted himself fortunate to have journeyed to China in only one year since his fa-ther and uncle previously had spent three years on their return because of politi-cal turbulence along the route.

Although regular travel on the Silk Road went back centuries, probably as far asthe early Bronze Age, the Chinese still perceived western Asia before the Tang as atreasure-house of legends and fantasies, a land of monstrous and marvelous ani-mals, the realm of the Daoist Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu), the settingof a fabulous mountain of jade, the most magical and sacred of substances. The Ti-betan Plateau seemed to be the edge of the world: Daoists believed the paradise of the Immortals lay beyond the wasteland of deserts and mountains; Chinese folk-tales imagined the distant west as a region of quicksand, killing frosts, and ever-lasting night, plagued by elephant-sized red ants and wasps big as bottle gourds. 54

This cloud of unknowing began to lift in the early Tang as China for the rsttime since the Han period looked far beyond its familiar northern periphery. In themid-seventh century, Tang military forces even seized control of the oasis com-munitiesaround theTarim basin, extendingChinesesway almost to Persia. To main-tain its armies and alliances, the Tang regime sent a million bolts of silk every yearto the Sogdians of Transoxiana in exchange for , warhorses, imports neededto keep the armys stock at the required number. After , horses reportedly perished from disease, a Tang chronicler stated, Horses are the military pre-

paredness of the state; if Heaven takes this preparedness away, the state will totterto a fall.55 Purchasing Transoxianian horses represented one of the heaviest drainson the treasury inasmuch as a million bolts of silk amounted to 8 million squaremeters of cloth. Export of such fabulous quantities resulted in pieces of silk beingused as common currency throughout Central Asia. Traders in Persia and Meso-potamia paid twice the price the fabric cost in China and carried it on to the Lev-ant to sell at high pro t. According to reports by travelers, Chinese silk over owedthe market stalls of Southwest Asia.

Under the early Tang regime, Buddhist pilgrims, Syrian merchants, Persianpriests (Manichaeans, Zoroastrians, and Nestorian Christians), Sogdian craftsmen,Jewish physicians,Arabian gem merchants, Tibetan mercenaries, and Uighur horsedealers traveled the Silk Road. The ourishing Tang economy, especially the teem-

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ing metropolis of Changan, acted like a magnet, drawing acrobats, painters,dancers, magicians,and musicians along thecamel trails. Fleeing fromMuslim con-querors, some of the elite of Sassanian Persia, including the imperial family, sought

refuge in China. Within a generation, Persian traders recently converted to Islamcrowded the streets of Changan. Diplomats, missionaries, and merchants movedalong the corridors of Central Asia, their collective activity drawing distant regionscloser together than ever before. The Tang court sent four embassies to India in themid-seventh century, and northern Indian states dispatched envoys to Changan toplead for military help against Tibetan warlords.

The western focus of the early Tang meant that the seventh century was a greatage for the expansion of Buddhism in East Asia. Chinese merchants imported In-diancommoditiesneeded forBuddhist ceremonies, including coral, pearls, incense,lapis lazuli, cotton cloth, and glass vessels. Chinese monks, who sometimes actedas diplomatic emissaries, exchanged large amounts of silk fabric for precious In-dian relics, such as the supposed parietal bone of the Buddha (Siddartha Gautama,d. ca. . . .). With a train of twenty horses, Xuanzang brought back man-uscripts of Buddhist lore, statues of the Buddha, and enshrined bits and pieces of the Buddhas esh. Regrettably, his only elephant plunged into a river gorge in thePamirs when bandits attacked his caravan. 56

At the request of the emperor Taizong (r. ), Xuanzang wrote an accountof his travels, and in subsequent generations his exploits became incorporated intoChinese popular culture, including oral tradition, folktales, poems, and short sto-ries. Most notably, Wu Chengen (ca. ) made them the basis for his in-

uential comic fantasy, The Journey to the West, in which the trickster characterMonkey takes center stage rather than the pious pilgrim. As a consequence of thenovels popularity, the supernatural adventures of Monkey and Xuanzang (calledby theBuddhist name Tripitaka) became common themesfor porcelain decorationin the seventeenth century.

Xuanzangs pilgrimage took him to numerous shrines of Buddhist bodhisattvas,

enlightened beings who forgo nirvana to help others. Near the Ganges in northernIndia, he prayed before a sandalwood statue of thebodhisattva Avalokitesvara (Per-ceiver of the Worlds Sounds). With the Buddha himself having attained nirvanaand thus having transcended human affairs, believers regarded bodhisattvas (orBuddhas-in-the-making), as accessible and altruistic beings who aided mortals indaily troubles and in reaching Buddhahood. By the early centuries of the commonera, Avalokitesvara had emerged as the most signi cant personi cation of com-passion in Buddhism, a model of perfection in a hallowed pantheon. In due course,Buddhist communities throughout Asia paid worship to him. He became a revered

gure to wayfarers on the Silk Road because of his response to cries of pain andsuffering. According to the Lotus Sutra, the most popular Buddhist scripture in theTang and Song periods, This bodhisattva can grant fearlessness to living beings.

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Ifyou call upon his name, you will be delivered fromtheseevil-hearted bandits [whorob traveling merchants]. 57

Xuanzang promoted the holy mans cult when he returned home, a cause later

taken up by the empress Wu. The career of Avalokitesvara subsequently took a cu-rious turn, however: by the tenth century, under the impact of Chinese folk reli-gion, he became transformed into Guanyin, thespiritof compassion and fecundity,who herself later would take on the guise of the mother of the Christian god. At allstages of the bodhisattvas cultural pilgrimage, porcelain gurines represented theprincipal means by which the sacred personage became tangible and proximate tomost believers, whether as Avalokitesvara reclining on a lotus blossom, Guanyincuddling a baby boy, or the Virgin Mary ngering a rosary. (See gure .)

EURASIAN CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN THE TANG

Porcelain and other Chinese arts responded to the Tang opening to the west. 58 Oa-sis communities on the Silk Road played the role of middlemen, conveying their versions of Indian and Persian pictorial methods to China, such as rhythmic pat-terns, rotating arabesques, stylized owers, geometric shapes, molded relief, in-terlaced designs, and exuberant colors. A number of plant patterns, including theacanthus, palmette, and peony-like blossoms, entered the mainstream of Chineseart after monks and artisans copied them from hundreds of Buddhist cave templesand monumental tombs at Dunhuang, near the eastern terminus of the Silk Road.The quintessential Buddhist motif of the lotus, journeying from South Asia to theMiddle Kingdom byway ofPersia and the caravan track, embarked on its triumphalprogress in Chinese art and architecture. Foreign in uence led to one of the mostenduring Chinese decorative devices on porcelain plates and bowls, a swirling bandof owers surrounding a central medallion, such as a sketch of a carp, duck, orblossoma format whose remote descendant is the conventional pattern still fre-quently painted on modern dinner plates.

Auspicious Buddhist objects, such as the bodhi tree, parasol, wheel, and shell,became xtures in Chinese ornament. Figures of peacocks, stags, wild sheep, andeagles entered the Chinese ornamental repertoire by way of decoration on South-west Asian silverwares. Transmitted by designs on imported textiles, so too didwingedhorses, grif ns, andchimera, fanciful counterparts of theactual noveltiespeacocks, cheetahs, date palm, g tree, jasmine ower, almond tree, lettuce, polo,and chessthat arrived in China from Southwest Asia around the same time. Inreturn for these bequests, China sent the apricot tree, the rhubarb plant, and silk-worm cocoons in the opposite direction.

Southwest Asian glass and metal vessels also reached China, where in due coursepotters replicated them. Silver bird-headed ewers came from Persia (orpossibly theeastern Mediterranean) to China, where elite consumers called them huping, bar-

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barian bottles, and placed them in their tombs. Potters copied the ewer, helping tomake it a fashionable item. Ina centuries-long roundabout typical ofceramics, mer-chants exported Tang bird-headed porcelain ewers to Southwest Asia, where both

earthenware potters and metalworkers duplicated them in the eleventh century.Traded across Central Asia, the Southwest Asian pilgrim ask became con atedwith the leather canteens of pastoral nomads, and Chinese potters then translatedthe ask, known as a bianhu ( attened vase) in China, into porcelain. Often de-picted on the funerary camels of the Tang, the pilgrim ask, sometimes with sim-ulated leather stitching on its sides,carried decorative motifs derivingfrom theHel-lenistic kingdoms ( . . .) of the eastern Mediterranean, including reliefsof dancing girls, winged lions, and mounted archers. Porcelain pilgrim asks be-came high-status relics in Tang tombs, and merchants exported the asks to South-west Asia along with other vessels.59 (See gure .)

Archaeologists have excavated shards of Tang ceramics from many locations inSouthwest Asia, although some black-glazed, fth-century pottery fragments dis-covered beneath the oor of a mosque at Siraf, on the northern coast of the PersianGulf, represent the earliest dated evidence for Chinese artifacts in the region. Thepottery almostcertainlycame to Persia in ships,always thepreferred mode of trans-port for that merchandise. The rst archaeological con rmation of direct maritimetrade between China and Southwest Asia came as recently as from investiga-tion of an early-ninth-century Arabian or Indian shipwreck off the island of Beli-tung, between Sumatraand Borneo. Chineseceramics made upall but a small frac-tion of the cargo and included ne northern whitewares, polychrome bowls, andlarge storage jars made in Guangdong province. The whitewares are the rst porce-lains known to have been exported from China. 60

Just as commerce on the Silk Road depended on knowledge of oases and moun-tain passes between Dunhuang and Samarqand, maritime trade between Cantonand the ports of the Persian Gulf depended on understanding the monsoon windsof thesouthern seas. Known to the Chinese as ocean ship-driving winds (bozhao

feng), they constituted the climatic regimen that determined when ships could setsail.61 Since at least the rst century . ., Roman, Southwest Asian, and Hindumerchants had a practical grasp of the schedule of monsoon winds in the IndianOcean. Around that time, an anonymous writer, perhaps a Greek businessman inEgypt, produced a small handbook on the subject, the Periplus of the ErythreanSea, which spelled out when vessels could safely voyage between Arabia and thewesterncoast of India. 62 During the Tang and Song, merchants from various coun-tries and trading groups also gathered information on the operation of East Asianwinds. Seagoing traders in the Tang period based their enterprise on this accu-mulation of knowledge. Relying on steady, predictable ship-driving winds fromChina to the Indian Ocean, they established the rst substantial and enduring mar-itime connection between the Middle Kingdom and Southwest Asia. Chinese mer-

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chants in particular bene ted from that achievement when seaborne commerceexpanded during the Song.

Still, theSilk Road, rather than themaritime porcelain route, remained most im-

portant in the early Tang, the leading indicator of the dynamism and af uence of the period. Around the mid-eighth century, though, the dynasty ran into momen-tous problems, disrupting its homeland as well as interactions with the rest of Asia.TheAn Lushan rebellion ( ), ledby a Tang general of Turko-Sogdiandescent,plunged the empire into disorder, stymied the ourishing economy, and provoked violent xenophobia.With tens of thousands of persons killed, parts of Changan be-came a wasteland. All but a handful of the citys numerous Buddhist monasteriesand convents disappeared; so too did foreign dress and entertainments. Buddhismlost its cultural cachet among the aristocracy and gentry; vandals destroyed Bud-dhist wall paintings and statues throughout the empire in the s. The regimeturned against alien religions, even proscribing them in , a legacy the Jesuitsstill struggled with centuries later. Fighting, rebellion, and disease devastated therichest provinces, including the lower Yangzi region. Mobs in Canton massacredthousands of Muslim merchants in , and when trade revived decades later, sub-sequent pillages of the port by pirates and rebels dealt additional blows to overseasconnections. Many seaborne merchants, both Chinese and Southwest Asian, took refuge in northern Vietnam and carried on their business from there. Losing con-trol of Korea and the frontier region between Sichuan and Burma, the Tang regimefound itself besieged on all fronts.63

An event far from China foreshadowed the disasters that would strike the em-pire with the An Lushan rebellion. At the battle of Talas in , somewhere to theeast of Samarqand and south of Lake Balkhash, an Abbasid army defeated Tangforces. The victors took several thousand Chinese men into captivity in Baghdad,the Abbasid capital on the Tigris-Euphrates, where they may have passed onknowledge of paper making, silk weaving, and pottery glazing. An obscure clash atthe outermost limit of two great empires, Talas nonetheless represented a turning

point in the fortunes of Eurasia. As a consequence of the An Lushan rebellion a few years later, the Tang treasury fell bankrupt just when the cost of warhorses fromTransoxiana soared to the prohibitive price of forty bolts of silk each. Facing over-whelming force as well as nancial crisis, the Chinese military pulled back fromtheir strongholds on the Silk Road, leaving Islam to expand and Buddhism to facea long decline.64 The ceramic horses modeled by Tang potters, lean racehorses andmuscled warhorses, ceased to be produced, replaced in the Song by smaller, lessmagni cent animals characterized with round noses and stubby legs.

The battle of Talas marked the end of an era of Chinese dominance in CentralAsia; the empire would not reassert its power there until the nineteenth century.The Tang, however, sought good relations with the Abbasids, welcoming several of their embassies to Changan and gaining Arab military help in ghting the An

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Lushan rebels. Although diminished, trade continued on the Silk Road, and Ab-basid envoys to China returned home with gifts of porcelain. A Persian governorpresented Caliph Harun al-Rashid (r. ) with twenty pieces of imperial

porcelain, the like of which had never been seen before, along with two thousandmore commonplace vessels. 65 When Abbasid caliphsconstructed immense palaceson the Tigris-Euphrates in the ninth century, they also stimulated demandfor porce-lain and other Chinese products.

No matter how unstable and dangerous conditions became on the Silk Road,some merchants always found it pro table to make the trek. But the battle of Talas,the An Lushan rebellion, Tibetanseizure of the Gansu corridor, and the rise ofpow-erful nomadic confederations to the north of China transformed political relationsbetween the Middle Kingdom and Central Asia during the Song dynasty. As a con-sequence, China looked toward the Silk Road solely with apprehension, no longerbeguiled by the myths and fantasies of earlier days. Beyond the tracks of camel car-avans lay the steppe lands of tented nomads, the horse warriors who would redraw the map of imperial China. For its own security, the Northern Song necessarily maintained diplomatic contact with powers in Central Asia until the Liao state of the Qidan ( ) conquered northern China, bringing the rst phase of thedynasty to an end. Subsequently, the Jin state of the Jurchen ( ) defeatedthe Liao, cutting off imperial China from almost all contact with Central Asia. 66

The Jurchen even extracted an annual tribute from the Southern Song of ,taels of silver and as many bolts of silk. From to (and conquest by theMongols) the monarchs of the Middle Kingdom governed their rump empire, en-compassing two-thirds of theChinese lands, from a provisional capital atHangzhouin Zhejiang province, south of the Yangzi. Blocked from the Silk Road by powersto the north, the Southern Song turned decisively toward the sea.

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107

The Culture of Porcelain in ChinaCommerce, Confucians, and Connoisseurs, 10001400

During theSong period, a Chinesewriter exulted, The ships which sail the South-ern Sea and south of it are like houses. When their sails are spread, they are greatclouds in the sky.1 Government of cials and private entrepreneurs had reason tolook upon the huge junks with satisfaction, for their voyages contributed sub-stantially to a ourishing economy. Despitecostly, relentless threats from nomadicconfederations, Song China experienced growth and riches surpassing that of theearly Tang.

COMMERCE

Most regions of China, down to the village level, were drawn into a commer-cialized, monetary network. 2 Silver ingots in circulation rose from less than one

million around the year to ten million by . Copper coins issued by thegovernment million strings (or billion coins)under theNorthernSongstreamed out of China to become the international hard currency of East Asia. Agovernment magistratecomplained in that junksventured abroad loadedwithnothing but copper-cash, as if mariners were pouring all the currency of the Mid-dle Kingdom down a hole in the South China Sea. The next year, another of cialwrote, There are none among the ship captains who do not take cash away withthem. Cash was once a treasured commodity in China, but today it is commonly used among the barbarians. 3 A customs of cial complained that to trade for pep-per with Java, merchants are in the habit of smuggling copper-cash [out of China]for bartering purposes. 4

To increase the amount of cash in circulation, the Gaozong emperor (r.


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) of the Southern Song prohibited making domestic utensils from the metal, andtrying to set an example for privileged ranks, he took the dramatic step of meltingdown fteen hundred bronze vessels in the imperial collection. Government dec-

larations of the early thirteenth century speci cally called for export of ceramics tohalt the ow overseas ofcash and costly metals. As a governmentdocument ofstated, It is lamentable that of cials often use gold and silver for trading abroad,thus losingvaluablehard currency. Tradingwith silk textiles,porcelain, lacquer andother commodities is urged as an alternative. 5 A few years later, an of cial notedthatpotterywent toa quarter ofall the foreign placeswith which China had contact.

Trying to staunch the hemorrhage of precious metal, the Southern Song put outthe equivalent of million strings of copper-cash in the form of paper money,an expedient that contributed to galloping in ation that persisted ino the early Mingperiod. Accompanying this, an economic revolution in credit mechanisms, agri-culture, water transport, and metallurgy made China the richest, most economi-cally dynamic region on Earth. With a population of perhaps million in ,China had million people living in cities, more urban residents than the rest of the world put together. Seaborne trade became a mainstay of the government, ac-counting for percent of its revenue. The court rewarded port of cials who col-lected substantial taxes on imports, and with such incentives, custom duties, whichthe government set at percent, soared from , strings of cash in the latetenth century to million a century later. 6

For the rst time, China began treating the sea as a commercial zone, and theterm haishang (maritime merchant) was coined to identify those who made a liv-ingfrom seaborne exchange. 7 China emerged as a sea power, witha navy for coastaldefense and a transportation eet for carrying grain and tribute fromsouth to north.Seagoing craft entering the Yangzi River numbered in the tens of thousands, andnine major shipyards built over six hundred vessels a year. Timber for ship con-struction called for fty thousand trees a year, a harvest that contributed to defor-estation along the coast. Duanhong, a Buddhist monk, bemoaned the destruction

in 8 : grief spread through themountains,hewrote,when tens of thousand treeswere chopped down. 8

Advances in maritime technology, such as the magnetic compass, large light-houses, and sailing charts, reduced the perils of the ocean; pigeons carried mes-sages between ship and shore about prices and purchases. The merchant eet grew in numbers and capacity; some junks accommodated a thousand passengers andboasted six masts, four decks, andwatertight compartments. The largest vessels theworld had ever seen, they linked the ourishing economy of the Grand Canal andlower Yangziwith themarketsof Southwest Asia.Muslim traders of theSong perioddescribed the Chinese as the only people in the world with two eyes; Arabs sup-posedly had only one, Europeans none. 9 A Chinese poet described a coxswain


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singing as he steered his ship out to sea: I have limitless power in my hands, [so]who is afraid of the towering waves!10

Having lost all revenue from the northern provinces of his realm, the Gaozong

emperor encouraged overseas trade to reduce the tax burden of the population inthe south. He declared that the pro t of maritime trade contributes much to thenational income. Therefore, pursuing the former custom, the people of far-away countries should be encouraged to come to sell an abundant supply of foreigngoods.11 From government shipyards in Fujian andGuangdong, of cials provided vessels to private entrepreneurs, with percent of trading pro ts going to the courtand the rest to merchants. Members of the imperial clan took refuge in Quanzhou,where they became involved in shipping as investors and traders, despite laws ex-cluding them from such activities. Incorporated into the Agency for the SouthernBranch of theImperialClan, af liates of theclan rapidly increased from to ,individuals, making them a formidable trading presence in a city with a popula-tion of , .12 Zheng Xie ( ), a Song of cial, described Quanzhou:Maritime merchants crowd the place. Mixing together are Chinese and foreign-ers. Many nd rich and powerful neighbors. 13

Above all, population growth and foreign trade stimulated the ceramics indus-try. The Song period accounts for percent of all pottery kilns ever established inChinas history; porcelain was produced in counties in nineteen provinces. 14

In Hebei province, a major producer under the Northern Song, one excavated siterevealed potterydebris fteen meters deep over an area twiceas wide. In Longquancounty in Zhejiang province, whose potteries dominated production under theSouthern Song, more than ve hundred furnace complexes, many using the greatdragon kilns, have beenidenti ed by archaeologists. In Guangdongprovince, whereoutput mainly served overseas markets, kilns turned out wares. In southernFujian, percent of a population of slightly over three million owed their liveli-hood to the manufacture and export of ceramics. With some ki

101_ the pilgrim art

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