Article

Ceramics

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Ceramics

The ceramic trade across the South China Sea constitutes one of the most extensively documented material exchanges in the maritime history of Southeast Asia, spanning from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries and linking the kilns of China with the ports, burial grounds and domestic collections of the Malay Peninsula, Borneo and the Philippines. Chinese export ceramics—principally blue-and-white porcelains, celadons, stonewares and greenwares—were produced in vast quantities for a clientele that ranged from Muslim sultans and regional chiefs to settled farmers and forest nomads, and their distribution provides a durable chronological record of commercial activity in a region where organic and mineral commodities have long since perished [1, pp. 99–100], [2, p. 81]. The trade was shaped by shifting dynastic policies in China, the rise and fall of Muslim sultanates, and ultimately the collision of European colonial expansion with established Malay and Chinese commercial networks, a collision that destroyed the traditional system by the mid-seventeenth century [1, pp. 99–100].

Scope and Historical Definition

The earliest literary evidence for Chinese ceramics in the region comes from the Chu-fan-chi, compiled in 1225 by Chao Ju-Kua, superintendent of foreign trade in Guangzhou, which records that Chinese merchants carried green porcelain dishes, lacquered bowls, umbrellas, silks and iron pots for barter at ports along the eastern seaboard of the South China Sea, including Brunei Bay and the Philippine islands [1, p. 99]. The Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368) marked a period of innovation in the potteries of Jingdezhen and other coastal centres, when potters transitioned from part-time agricultural work to full-time production financed by merchants, and when technical advances permitted both monumental pieces and delicately moulded miniatures [1, p. 100]. Muslim taste, transmitted through Gujarati merchants and theologians who had established themselves in Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, favoured floral designs painted in cobalt blue under the glaze; cobalt itself had reached China in a prepared state via the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Malacca [1, p. 100].

The Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) introduced a more regulated framework. The first emperor, Hongwu, prohibited private foreign trade altogether, while his successor Yongle dispatched government fleets under the Muslim admiral Zheng He to explore the southern oceans between 1405 and approximately 1435 [1, pp. 101–102]. By the reign of Xuande (1426–36), fifty-eight kilns were in operation at Jingdezhen, producing blue-and-white porcelains decorated in Islamic taste for government-directed export [1, p. 102]. It was not until the ninth Ming emperor, Chenghua (1465–87), that the trade was liberalised: porcelain bearing a reign mark (nian hao) was permitted for sale to private customers, and by this time cobalt could be obtained from both imported and native sources [1, p. 102]. The bulk of stoneware and porcelain exported during the sixteenth century was carried in private Chinese or hired ships, with junks arriving at Brunei Bay with the northeast monsoon—initially two or three per year, later increasing to twenty or more [1, p. 104].

A trade junk recovered off Brunei Bay, entirely loaded with ceramics—approximately 12,000 items including blue-and-white porcelains from Jingdezhen—dates to this sixteenth-century period and provides direct physical evidence of the scale of the trade [1, p. 107]. The San Diego, a Manila galleon wrecked in 1600 off the west coast of Luzon, carried 500 blue-and-white pieces and 750 utilitarian pieces originally destined for New Mexico, evidencing the volume of Chinese porcelain shipped via the Pacific galleon trade [1, p. 113, n. 16].

Economic and Social Dynamics

The demand for Chinese ceramics in the region was initially driven by an advanced burial culture. In Luzon, excavations have revealed between ten and fifty imported pots placed together in native graves, suggesting that the islanders were attracted by the technical and aesthetic superiority of the imported wares over their own earthenware traditions [1, p. 100]. These peoples, the Austronesian Nusantao, had developed their own varied and advanced pottery craft centred on ancestor worship and burial rites; the adoption of imported ceramics added new status to their tradition and simultaneously to community life, while their own pot-making declined [1, p. 100]. Increasingly, however, wealthy citizens desired Chinese ceramics for display in their homes as status symbols, and sultans and regional chiefs (dato’s) endeavoured to imitate the prevailing Chinese attitude of collecting the best porcelain [1, pp. 100].

The economic structure of the trade was hierarchical. The Ming government fixed prices for export goods in a manner that favoured China: imports such as Borneo camphor, aromatics and pepper were assessed at the lowest prices, while Chinese exports such as silk, porcelain and iron were assessed highly [1, p. 104]. Regional chiefs controlled the populations of settled farmers who were themselves traders, and who produced surplus rice for both urban populations and export. Nomadic populations—sea nomads who collected pearls, marine products and beeswax, and forest nomads who found camphor, sago, aromatics and medicinal flora—lived in symbiotic relationship with the settled farmers, bartering their collected goods for iron tools, weapons and textiles [1, p. 104]. The ultimate link in the chain of foreign trade lay at some anchorage or in a forest clearing, where experience and tradition determined the value of a delivery [1, p. 104].

Pigafetta’s account of the 1521 visit of Magellan’s flagship to Brunei Bay provides a vivid snapshot of the social context. The sultan’s delegation presented porcelain jars as gifts; supper was served on large trays laden with ten or twelve porcelain dishes, and rice wine was drunk from small blue-and-white porcelain cups the size of an egg [1, p. 108]. Pigafetta reported that the market value of one small porcelain cup equalled that of three knives, and that six dishes equalled about a kilo of quicksilver [1, p. 108]. He also recorded a native explanation that the porcelain was made from ‘exceedingly white earth which is left for fifty years under the earth before it is worked, for otherwise it would not be fine; and that the father buries it for the son’—a remarkable tale probably derived from informants familiar only with the use of porcelains for burial [1, p. 108].

The Collapse of the Traditional Trade

The fall of Malacca to the Portuguese in 1511 introduced fundamental changes to the regional trade system. Brunei, which had occupied a pivotal position as the most prestigious internationally linked port on the eastern seaboard of the South China Sea by 1500, was forced to seek alternative commercial arrangements [1, pp. 99]. The arrival of Magellan’s flagship in Brunei Bay in 1521, and a Spanish attack on Brunei itself in 1578, caused the region’s trade to decline and religious conflicts to develop between Muslim and Christian contestants [1, p. 99]. The 1578 expedition, led by Captain General de Sande, resulted in the burning of the sultan’s five-tiered mosque, the plundering of noble houses and war boats, and the seizure of arsenals; the Spanish garrison subsequently fell ill and withdrew [1, p. 109].

From the seventeenth century, continuous bitter struggles between Christian-European and Muslim-Malay forces caused social and economic upheaval in the southern Philippines and in Brunei, and led to the eventual collapse of the traditionally Muslim trade of the area [1, p. 99]. In 1662, following internal disputes over succession, Sulu usurped the Brunei throne; the resulting ten-year crisis cost Brunei the territory now known as Sabah [1, p. 112]. By this time, most ceramic exports from China were intended for Europe rather than for the Southeast Asian market, and the porcelain trade in the region was no longer relevant [1, p. 112].

Material Evidence and Attribution

The study of Chinese export ceramics in Southeast Asia presents particular challenges of attribution and dating. Harrisson notes that successful blue-and-white patterns frequently continued in export for decades, even across centuries, and that history is often locally tainted, leaving uncertainties [1, p. 111]. The problem of identifying kiln origins for monochrome or blue-and-white ware is compounded by the fact that, although innumerable kilns have been excavated, the need to judge photographs and poor-quality descriptions makes many publications unreliable [1, p. 111]. The question of whether all ‘Kraak’ porcelain was made at Jingdezhen, or whether some was produced elsewhere, remains unresolved [1, p. 111].

Gibson-Hill’s 1955 study of animal motifs on Chinese export wares in Malayan collections offers a complementary perspective. Examining pieces and sherds in the Raffles Museum and other collections, he demonstrated that the animals depicted are almost exclusively species native to the coastal provinces of southern and eastern China—storks, egrets, herons, cranes, the Ring-necked Pheasant, the Swan Goose, the Sika deer, the tiger, and others—rather than species familiar to the intended buyers in Southeast Asia [3, pp. 178–179]. The artists appear to have been ‘unwilling, or unable, to represent species not found in southern and eastern China’ [3, p. 178]. Notably, the Eastern Peacock (Pavo muticus), though popular with Chinese artists in other media and ranging from Burma through Siam to the Malay Peninsula, does not appear to have been reproduced on export porcelain [2, p. 179, n. 6]. The most puzzling identification is the tree-shrew (Tupaia glis) on a Raffles Museum dish, a species that penetrates China only as far north as Yunnan, southwestern Guangxi and Hainan Island, making its selection as a decorative motif unexplained by any known mythological or medicinal association [3, pp. 181–182].

Martin’s 1985 study of the ceramic assemblage from Tioman Island demonstrates how the distribution of wares on a single island can be correlated with shifts in Chinese export geography. The concentration of eleventh- to twelfth-century Guangdong stonewares at the western settlement of Nipah mirrors the period when Guangzhou was the principal port for South Seas trade, while the later assemblage at the eastern settlement of Juara—comprising Fujian whitewares, Zhejiang celadons and Jiangsu wares—corresponds to the twelfth- to fourteenth-century dominance of Quanzhou [2, p. 86]. The recovery of seventeenth-century ‘Kraak’ design wares and Sawankhaloke storage jars, matched to the cargo of the VOC ship Witte Leeuw (1613) wrecked in St Helena harbour, confirms the island’s continued use during the Dutch period [2, p. 89]. A notable lacuna in the assemblage—the near-absence of eighteenth-century material—Martin attributes to the combined effects of Dutch spice-trade monopolies, endemic piracy, and the diversion of trade to the Trengganu coast [2, p. 89].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on ceramics reflects a progression from broad historical narrative to specialised material analysis. Harrisson’s 2003 article represents the most comprehensive treatment, drawing on Chinese, Arab, European and archaeological sources to reconstruct the trade system in its full economic, political and social context, and concluding with a frank assessment of the difficulties inherent in attributing and dating Asian trade ware [1]. Her earlier monograph, Later Ceramics in South-East Asia: Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries (1995), provides the typological framework underpinning the attribution discussions in that article [1, p. 114, n. 21]. Gibson-Hill’s 1955 study, by contrast, is a small but precise piece of art-historical zoology, applying the naturalist’s taxonomic eye to resolve questions about the working methods of Chinese potters and the degree to which export production was responsive to foreign taste [3]. Martin’s 1985 article, published to accompany a Southeast Asian Ceramic Society exhibition at Muzium Seni Asia, University of Malaya, represents an early attempt to correlate a Southeast Asian island assemblage with dated Chinese kiln-site material and to position Tioman within a comparative framework that includes Allai Piddy (Sri Lanka), Kedah and Kota Cina [2]. The 1967 Manila Pottery Seminar, referenced by Harrisson, brought together foreign ceramic specialists to examine varieties excavated in the Philippines, and the Locsin excavations presented at that seminar contributed significantly to the understanding of Yuan and Ming trade ceramics in the region [1, p. 110]. The Turiang shipwreck, a fourteenth-century Chinese vessel, has been described as ‘upsetting Southeast Asian ceramic history’ [4], though the full details of that assessment fall outside the scope of the records available here. Collectively, these studies illustrate a field in which the physical durability of ceramics has made them an indispensable chronological record for a region whose organic trading commodities have long since perished, while simultaneously presenting persistent challenges of attribution that resist resolution by any single method of analysis.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. Harrisson B (2003). The ceramic trade across the South China Sea JMBRAS 76(1): 99–114.
  2. J.A. Martin (1985). A ceramic legacy of Asia’s maritime trade on Tioman Island JMBRAS 58(1): 81–90.
  3. C.A. Gibson-Hill (1955). Animal studies on Chinese export wares JMBRAS 28(1): 179–183.
  4. C. Barnes and Sten Sjostrand (2001). The Turiang: a fourteenth century Chinese shipwreck upsetting Southeast Asian ceramic history JMBRAS 74(1): 71–109.