So a Qing vase has sold for a staggering £43m. Produced in the 18th century for the Qing emperor Qianlong or Qing Gao Zong it once held pride of place in the Chinese Royal Palace and was inevitably fired in the Imperial Kilns at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province.
Jingdezhen is a place I know very well having visited it first in the mid 1990s and several times since. It is the place that is credited with inventing porcelain over 1000 years ago. Porcelain was valued more highly than gold in the 17th and 18th century courts of Europe and so began a quest to manufacture it in Europe culminating in the development of porcelain at the Meissen factory in Saxony by Johan Friedrich Böttger. It was not until 1797 that Josiah Spode invented bone china in England with the unusual idea of adding 40% calcined cow bone to the body that when fired gave the china a wonderful translucence still prized today.
Now Jingdezhen is also the place where the artist Ai Wei Wei chose to have his more than 10 million porcelain sunflower seeds produced that form the basis for his exhibition at the Tate Gallery. It’s a fascinating sight and is a comment on mass manufacturing, production for the demands of the market but all with an intimate personal aesthetic quality, each sunflower seed looking similar but in fact being unique and different. I loved it and would recommend it if you’re in London any time before the exhibition closes in May next year.
In a famous speech to the people of Burslem, the mother town of the Potteries on 29th October 1881 entitled Art and the Beauty of the Earth, William Morris said:
“You who in these parts make such hard, smooth, well-compacted, and enduring pottery understand well that you must give it other qualities besides those which make it fit for ordinary use. You must profess to make it beautiful as well as useful, and if you did not you would certainly lose your market”
William Morris understood that everyday items could be made with purely function in mind but that if you wanted to maintain your market you had to make them beautiful as well. British design and creativity is recognised the world over for its ability to do exactly that. China is a vast and rapidly growing economy. The Prime Minister has led a trade mission there this week, highlighting the opportunities for UK companies over the coming years. The burgeoning middle class has a real appetite for British designed goods and you only have to look in downtown Shanghai at the Bentley showroom or the Wedgwood shop to see how successful they’re being. We have fantastic products and services, we apply cutting edge technology and innovation with world leading design and marketing and we must avoid competing on price. William Morris knew it, the potters of the Imperial Kilns in Jingdezhen knew it. If we “make it beautiful” if we apply technology and innovation we will succeed in capturing the new emerging markets that the Prime Minister is urging British companies to grasp
