A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [161]
Under the Mongol emperors, China developed one of the most enduring and successful luxury products in the history of the world – a product fit for stately pleasure-domes, but which spread in a matter of centuries from grand palaces to simple parlours all over the world: Chinese blue and white porcelain. We now think of blue and white as quintessentially Chinese, but that is not how it began. This archetypal Chinese aesthetic in fact comes from Iran. Thanks to the long Chinese habit of writing on objects, we know exactly who commissioned these two blue and white porcelain vases, which gods they were offered to, and indeed the very day on which they were dedicated.
The importance of Chinese porcelain is hard to overstate. Admired and imitated for more than a thousand years, it has influenced virtually every ceramic tradition in the world, and it has played a crucial role in cross-cultural exchanges. In Europe, blue and white porcelain is practically synonymous with China, and is always associated with the Ming Dynasty. But the David Vases, now in the British Museum, make us rethink this history, for they predate the Ming and were made under Qubilai Khan’s Mongol dynasty, known as the Yuan, which controlled all of China until the middle of the fourteenth century.
Seven hundred years ago most of Asia and a large part of Europe were reeling from the invasions of the Mongols. We all know Genghis Khan as the ultimate destroyer, and the sack of Baghdad by his son still lives in Iraqi folk memory. Genghis’s grandson Qubilai was also a great warrior, but under him Mongol rule became more settled and more ordered. As emperor of China he supported scholarship and the arts, and he encouraged the manufacture of luxury goods. Once the empire was established, a ‘Pax Mongolica’ ensued, a Mongolian Peace which, like the Pax Romana, ensured a long period of stability and prosperity. The Mongol Empire spread along the ancient Silk Road and made it safe. It was thanks to the Pax Mongolica that Marco Polo was able to travel from Italy to China in the middle of the thirteenth century and then return to tell Europe what he’d seen.
One of the startling things he had seen was porcelain; indeed, the very word ‘porcelain’ comes to us from Marco Polo’s description of his travels in Qubilai Khan’s China. The Italian porcellana, ‘little piglet’, is a slang word for cowry shells, which do indeed look a little like curled-up piglets. And the only thing that Marco Polo could think of to give his readers an idea of the shell-like sheen of the hard, fine ceramics that he saw in China was a cowry shell, a porcellana. And so we’ve called it ‘little piglets’, porcelain, ever since – that is if we’re not just calling it ‘china’. I don’t think there’s another country in the world whose name has become interchangeable with its defining export.
The David Vases are so called because they were bought by Sir Percival David, whose collection of more than 1,500 Chinese ceramics is now in a special gallery at the British Museum. We’ve put the vases right at the entrance to the gallery to make it quite clear that they are the stars of the show: David acquired them separately from two different private collections, and was able to reunite them in 1935. They’re big, just over 60 centimetres (24 inches) high and about 20 centimetres (8 inches) across at the widest, with an elegant shape, narrower at top and bottom, swelling in the centre. Apparently floating between the white porcelain body and the clear glaze on top lies the