The business of making porcelain: life and work in the city of blue and white
This talk will focus on Jingdezhen, the city we all know as the site of imperial ceramics production. Much has been written about the extraordinary wares that were produced here through the centuries and the ways in which these reflected changing tastes and preferences of consumers. We also know a great deal about the materials used and the designs and shapes created in Jingdezhen. This talk will take a more prosaic look at the city, exploring, for example, the ways in which skilled and unskilled workers were recruited and paid, the management of resources in the kilns, such as cobalt, clay and firewood as well as the production of tools, such as buckets, stools and hammers. It will seek to demonstrate that the production of the extraordinary pieces of imperial porcelain depended on a combination of aspects that made Jingdezhen different from almost anywhere else, such as the finest raw materials and the highest level of skill, as well as aspects that made Jingdezhen exactly the same as any other large-scale site of production. Without careful management of all aspects of the business of making porcelain, Jingdezhen’s potters might never have produced the fine pieces that we know and love today.
This lecture is kindly sponsored by The Butler Collection and by Woolley and Wallis
Speaker
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Anne GerritsenAnne Gerritsen is professor in the History department at the University of Warwick, Chair of Asian Art at Leiden University, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She has published on local religion in Jiangxi in Ji’an Literati and the Local (2007), on ceramics in The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World (2020), and edited several collections on material culture with Giorgio Riello, including Writing Material Culture History (2nd ed. 2021), The Global Lives of Things (2015) and Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia (2017). A volume on Global Jars is forthcoming in 2023.
