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6 - Blue and White Porcelain and the Fifteenth-Century World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2020

Anne Gerritsen
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Summary

This chapter explores the ways in which blue-and-white porcelains travelled away from their site of production in Jingdezhen, into new cultural contexts, where they acquired new meanings and values. In that process, this chapter argues, the blue-and-white porcelains retained a certain distinctiveness: their attraction and high value was in part to do with the fact that they were associated with a remote site of production, and a cultural context that was different from their new environment. Their value was in some ways determined by the fact that they were exotic and different, but their difference did not prevent them from becoming part of a new cultural context. They became embedded into new localities, where they acquired specifically local meaning and significance. The evidence is drawn from a fourteenth-century manuscript in Bagdad, a ritual manual from fifteenth-century Korea, a shipwreck in the Philippines, and an Italian Renaissance painting. The combination of exotic distinctiveness and local significance underscores again that the story of porcelain is an intertwined story of global and local meaning.

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Chapter
Information
The City of Blue and White
Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World
, pp. 114 - 133
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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