Chinese Ceramics in Europe

The porcelain shards unearthed abroad testifies that in the Song dynasty the porcelain wares from Jingdezhen were exported to East Europe, in the Yuan dynasty they swarmed into Europe through Southeast Asia and West Asia, which appealed to the middle and the upper classes there.

In the Ming dynasty, the merchants from Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Britain, Germany and Sweden came to Guangzhou and Xiamen to deal with ceramics. The first among them is the Portuguese navigator and his followers who, in the ninth year of the Zhengde era (1514), bought 100,000 Wucai Porcelain wares from Jingdezhen and shipped them to Portugal where all the European buyers strived to buy from them by wholesaling. Afterwards, the Spanish merchants took the Philippines as their beachhead of the maritime trade. They bought a great mass of Chinese porcelain wares, among which there were over 3,000 ones just in the royal court. In mid-Ming, the Dutch pirates in St. Helena robbed the Portuguese ship San Diego which was loaded with 28 packages of big porcelain wares and 14 of miner ones-the first mass shipment of the Chinese porcelain. According to an incomplete statistics, from the thirtieth year or so of the Wanli era through the early Qing dynasty, China had exported over 16,000,000 porcelain wares to the rest of the world, among which 10,110,000 were from Jingdezhen. Hence the prevailing of Chinese porcelain in Europe, including two major types-the blue and white and colored wares.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, as the British, Dutch, French and Swedish companies of "The East India" were set up, the Chinese porcelain wares were further massively and continuously shipped to the European markets.

world
Chinese Ceramics in Africa