Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Six Chinese
teapots
export porcelain
teapots
have
shaped teapots
Sotheby's,
Amsterdam,
SHIRLEY
MALONEY
MUELLER
Guangzhou
between
in her course along the coast of Vietnam she met a dramatic end.' The most likely
cause of her destruction
by
piles of cast-iron woks that fused into a block of metal and several stacks of ceramics,
including teabowls, that melted into pillars of porcelain.f Piracy, a bolt of lightning
during a severe storm, or even a clumsy cook in the galley could have ignited the
fire, and the overloading of a cargo of heavy metallic objects and ceramics' must have
contributed
to the doomed vessel's final voyage to the depths of the South China Sea
about ninety miles south of Cap Ca Mau in southern Vietnam. Whatever precipitated
the wreck, which was discovered
by Vietnamese
fishermen
Mau cargo tells the story of the development of Chinese export porcelain teapots during the first decades of the eighteenth century, the early years of the golden age of
the China trade.
During the reign of the Yongzheng emperor
celain teapots were still largely Chinese
It was not until the mid-eighteenth
largely modeled on European
in inspiration,
(1723-35)
Chinese
export por-
prototypes.
were
teapot had a single opening on the interior where the spout joins the body (thereby
allowing the tea leaves to accumulate in the spout, clogging it) and no perforation in
the cover to release the steam and allow the intake of air to facilitate pouring. While a
small hole for a steam vent began to appear on Chinese export porcelain teapot covers
as early as the late 1600s,4 it was not uniformly present until the 1730s. At the same
time teapots began to be made almost consistently with three small perforations or
strainer holes on the interior body at the base of the spout, which developed as a logi-
model with the perforated spout base and vented cover became the standard model
for all shapes of Chinese export porcelain teapots.
Significantly, the Ca Mau cargo contained
traditional
Showing both the absence and presence of these two utilitarian develop-
ments, indicating that tea vessels at this moment were on the cusp of modernization,
their variety confirms the challenge that the Chinese and the Europeans faced in
their attempts to produce entirely functional and attractive tea-serving vessels for the
West.
6
Export
straining
holes at the
three perforations
and
7
which range from fluted pear and melon to plain pear and spherical, and their patterns
and styles of decoration.
These
disparities
and decoration
suggest that
these teapots not only were produced at different potting centers but most certainly
did not represent the fulfillment of a single company order. The coexistence of more
advanced models with those of a preexisting
gamation
dependent
on instructions
by their masters, who in turn had received their orders from the European
supercargoes
linguistic interpreters,
nomics played significant roles. It is no surprise that the kiln masters at unrelated sites
made their teapots differently, depending on their understanding of, and willingness
or even ability to accommodate, the necessary innovations required by their current
Western instructions.
While these observations are consistent with those described in previous discussions of this subject," the discovery and analysis of the Ca Mau cargo confirms that
neither the Chinese porcelain producers nor the Asian and European consumers made
a sudden break with tradition when the functional innovations
types and forms of teapots continued
equally receptive
heretofore
appeared.
Instead, all
Shirley Maloney Mueller, a member of the American Ceramic Circle Board of Directors,
is an independent scholar specializing in Chinese export porcelain. She lives in Indianapolis,
Indiana. Her e-mail addressisExportporcelain@aol.com.
NOTES
and Information
Vietnamese
of
Early Chinese
Export Teapots,"
the Lid:
Transactions of the
J. A. [org,
p.19.