Pottery Exhibit at the Shanghai Museum 上海博物馆

One of the technologies most associated with the Chinese is pottery. Pottery itself came to evolve into different forms and purposes, eventually morphing into more specialized forms. I remember playing the game named Civilization, one of the technologies that needed to be discovered was pottery, unless you were playing the Chinese cilization. Like the game, pottery was an enabler of progress. Food can be now be stored enabling people to abandon the nomadic way of life.

Over the centuries, the process of pottery was continuously refined and with it also comes its own form of luxury. The was the birth of porcelain, another Chinese invention. So strong was the association of porcelain with the Chinese that another name for porcelain came to be china or chinaware. The Shanghai Museum has various exhibitions of pottery and porcelain through various stages of refinement. I was under the impression that porcelain had always been the classical blue on white but I was surprised to see different colors even in that era.

Like bronze, porcelain ware also lasts a long time though cracks still appear in most of the exhibits. It is probably a natural progression from using bronze vessels for drinking to using pottery and porcelain as I would imagine would be more hygenic to use. Various types of vessels were on display from water to spirits to the ornamental. Chinese society had already evolved to such a degree that there was already a class for the rich people or the royalty who are normally the patrons of these articles, at least the more impressive ones. Right now, the place called Jingdezhen 景德镇 is the porcelain capital of China and it is said that the procelain there is the best you can find. It has been like that for the past hundreds of years and I would expect that it will continue doing so far into the future.

[xmlgm {http://www.worldwanderings.net/kml/ShanghaiMuseum.kmz} zoom=19]