Book contents
- The City of Blue and White
- The City of Blue and White
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Table
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The Shard Market of Jingdezhen
- 2 City of Imperial Choice: Jingdezhen, 1000–1200
- 3 Circulations of White
- 4 From Cizhou to Jizhou: The Long History of the Emergence of Blue and White Porcelain
- 5 From Jizhou to Jingdezhen in the Fourteenth Century: The Emergence of Blue and White and the Circulations of People and Things
- 6 Blue and White Porcelain and the Fifteenth-Century World
- 7 The City of Blue and White: Visualizing Space in Ming Jingdezhen, 1500–1600
- 8 Anxieties over Resources in Sixteenth-Century Jingdezhen
- 9 Skilled Hands: Managing Human Resources and Skill in the Sixteenth-Century Imperial Kilns
- 10 Material Circulations in the Sixteenth Century
- 11 Local and Global in Jingdezhen’s Long Seventeenth Century
- 12 Epilogue: Fragments of a Global Past
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Blue and White Porcelain and the Fifteenth-Century World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2020
- The City of Blue and White
- The City of Blue and White
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Table
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The Shard Market of Jingdezhen
- 2 City of Imperial Choice: Jingdezhen, 1000–1200
- 3 Circulations of White
- 4 From Cizhou to Jizhou: The Long History of the Emergence of Blue and White Porcelain
- 5 From Jizhou to Jingdezhen in the Fourteenth Century: The Emergence of Blue and White and the Circulations of People and Things
- 6 Blue and White Porcelain and the Fifteenth-Century World
- 7 The City of Blue and White: Visualizing Space in Ming Jingdezhen, 1500–1600
- 8 Anxieties over Resources in Sixteenth-Century Jingdezhen
- 9 Skilled Hands: Managing Human Resources and Skill in the Sixteenth-Century Imperial Kilns
- 10 Material Circulations in the Sixteenth Century
- 11 Local and Global in Jingdezhen’s Long Seventeenth Century
- 12 Epilogue: Fragments of a Global Past
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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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- The City of Blue and WhiteChinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World, pp. 114 - 133Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020