Blue and Whites
TWO CENTS | DEC 4, 2020
Blue and Whites
Does fine china have a place in
the “Made-in-China” era?
Washing the dishes at my friend’s place the other day, I turned over a plate and laughed out loud at the sight of the word “CHINA” stamped on the back. It reminded me of the prank / OCD impulse to label everything in a room with a Post-it note.
It took me a moment to realize the label was not describing what the object was but rather where it was from. We Western consumers have become so inured to the “Made in China” label that we’ve almost forgotten that upmarket dinnerware was so closely identified with where it came from that we started calling it simply “china.”
Glazed pottery evolved over hundreds of years in China, finally becoming what we would recognize as porcelain today between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago. But it was actually craftsmen working in the Middle East who applied the local cobalt mineral to their coatings, creating the blue-and-white decorative theme that would make chinaware prized for centuries.
The ancient Silk Road connecting China to Mesopotamia (and beyond) is what enabled this iterative blending of technologies and traditions. And it’s also what would eventually introduce Europeans to the craft that would spellbind them for centuries after, and foreshadow China’s export primacy in the 21st century.
Legend has it the European craze for Chinese porcelain was sparked in 1604 when the Dutch East India Company intercepted a Portuguese cargo ship returning from Asia with thousands of pieces of blue-and-whites and auctioned them off in Amsterdam.
Westerners were struck by chinaware in a time when international travel was restricted mainly to soldiers and merchants, so household goods were a relatively accessible taste of some faraway land. And it’s hard to overstate the shock that must’ve come from beholding such brilliant blue brushwork against a pearly white background, in an age when almost everything in the urban colorscape was some shade of beige. But just as importantly, the dinnerware was just made more solidly than what was produced locally at the time.
The French term chinoiserie would come to describe cheaper, European-made ware that didn’t come close to the original in either quality or the subject matter depicted; it was a Westerner’s caricature of the exotic East. (Today, cheap Chinese-made knock-offs of Rolex watches and Gucci handbags are a cosmically appropriate payback.)
Growing up, my family lived for several years in Japan, a country that adopted and built on the blue-and-white obsession. On trips to the beach, my mom would scavenge for choice pieces of pottery shards that littered the shore alongside cigarette butts and soda bottles. They were just trash from another era – an era when beautiful household goods were almost as universal as plastic junk is today. But it’s hard to imagine beachgoers in a hundred years’ time finding much romantic about our plasticky discards.
Along with tea and silk, Chinese porcelain helped form what was, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the precursor to today’s uncomfortable trade imbalance — the ability for China to produce, in huge amounts, goods for which they don’t expect much in return besides cash. It was that imbalance, in part, that Britain used to justify dumping opium from its Indian colony onto the unsuspecting Chinese market, drugging a good portion of the populace into a pliable stupor.
The Opium Wars, in addition to European carve-outs at key Chinese ports, and the civil war that ensued, were immensely humiliating to the world’s most populous country, and would hobble its preeminence as an exporter for at least a hundred intervening years. China in the 21st century is merely trying to regain a perch it held for a long stretch of its history.
Today, China is once again the world’s biggest exporter by far, and its consumer market is second only to shopaholic America’s. Its hyper-efficient factories churn out everything from Christmas decorations to air conditioners to iPhones to, yes, tableware. IKEA sources about a third of its products from suppliers in China, more than from any other country. (A quick accounting of my mismatched collection of dinnerware reveals a modern-day Silk Road of origins: Indonesia, China, Turkey, China, China.)
But apart from being ubiquitous of late, the “Made in China” tag has also become somewhat of a joke, shorthand for something bought on the cheap and delivered quickly, but compromised in quality. Apple is careful to append the “Assembled in China” etching on its products with a reassuring “Designed in California.”
Some cracks are starting to appear in that stereotype however. Deli is a twenty-odd-year-old Chinese glassmaker that has graduated from churning out cheap, chippable drinkware to a delicate finery that competes with the likes of Denmark’s Bodum or Austria’s Riedel. And online dinnerware purveyor Our Place collaborates with a mostly female range of artists and chefs on its smart, made-in-China pots and serving dishes.
Scotch, afghans, madras, Champagne, Bourbon, and Parmesan are all examples of products that became so entwined with where they originated that they took those place names on as their own. Many of these are even legally protected from outsiders piggybacking on their prestige. But few place-named products seem either as enduring or as quotidian as china.
And as interior designers and consumers increasingly reject the pared-down Zen aesthetic in favor of maximalism and granny chic, the complex patterns and over-the-top narrative designs of delicate blue-and-white dinner plates suddenly don’t feel so out of place outside of Grandma’s dining room cabinet.
Graphic designer Dan Moyer successfully Kickstarted a line of the classic willow-pattern ceramics with pterodactyls, UFOs and pirates standing in for the traditional pagodas and dragons. If the so-called Calamityware line seems uniquely suited to a 2020 full of disaster and anxiety, it was actually begun back in 2015. But in a twist a 16th century trader on the Silk Road might appreciate, his dishes are crafted neither in China nor closer to home in the U.S., but rather at a nearly 200-year-old plant in Poland.
Back at my parents’ house for Thanksgiving this year, I asked my mom about the delicate-looking collection of blue-and-white dishes gathering dust in the back of the dining room cabinet. She said her brother gifted them to her years ago from the 158-year-old San Francisco chintz emporium Gump’s. Like fine Chinese dinnerware, the appeal of a store that traffics in $125 gold-embroidered candles and $800 faux-flower arrangements has waxed and waned over the years. But the one-two punch of an Amazon-ified shopping landscape and the coronavirus pandemic may be what finally lays it low.
Porcelain helped cement China as an enchantingly beautiful and painfully masterful place in the world’s eye for hundreds of years, but also boxed it in. In the 21st century, China is an unfathomably complex and dynamic place, but in an era of mass production and a global pandemic, its brand could use a refresh, and the rest of us could certainly use something as shiny, transporting, sustainable, and supremely practical as a nice dish.
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Alexander McQuilkin is a full-time bureaucrat in New York City’s housing agency, and a part-time writer and wino.
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