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Japanese or Chinese? Non-invasive analysis of East Asian blue-and-white porcelain

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Abstract

Japanese blue-and-white porcelain was developed in the Hizen area on Kyushu during the early seventeenth century and quickly shared the overseas markets with Chinese blue-and-white, which has been the favorite porcelain ware in those markets since the fourteenth century. Although most Hizen export blue-and-white imitated Chinese patterns, several visual and stylistic criteria have been identified that differentiate the productions of the two countries. Nevertheless, in archeological contexts, distinguishing blue-and-white porcelain sherds of different provenance remains a real challenge. In this paper, the chemical composition of Hizen blue-and-white porcelain sherds excavated from four sites within Spanish colonial Manila has been investigated with non-invasive portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) complemented with fiber optics reflectance spectroscopy (FORS). The data were compared with those obtained on samples from the two main blue-and-white porcelain production centers in China: **gdezhen and Zhangzhou. The results have revealed the characteristics of Hizen ware and shown that blue-and-white porcelain produced in Arita using the Izumiyama deposits as the raw material can be distinguished from the Chinese productions using pXRF. However, this research has also highlighted the limitations of the approach and the need for a more systematic study of the blue-and-white porcelain production from the various kiln complexes in the Hizen domain and beyond.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the National Museum of the Philippines and the History and Folklore Museum of Arita for their support and access to materials, as well as Dr. Min Li for providing samples for this research. We also thank Christopher Shaffer from Thermo Fisher Scientific for the XRD analysis of the Izumiyama samples.

Funding

This study was supported by a Hiroshi Wagatsuma Graduate Fellowship, Asia Institute, University of California, Los Angeles.

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  1. Institute of Anthropology, National Tsing Hua University, No. 101, Sec.2, Kuang-Fu Rd, East District, Hsinchu City, 30013, Taiwan

    Ellen Hsieh

  2. UCLA/Getty Conservation Interdepartmental Program and Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, A410 Fowler Building, Box 951510, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1595, USA

    Christian Fischer

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Hsieh, E., Fischer, C. Japanese or Chinese? Non-invasive analysis of East Asian blue-and-white porcelain. Archaeol Anthropol Sci 11, 5483–5497 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-019-00876-7

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