The David Vases

Thank you for downloading this episode of a History of the World in 100 Objects from BBC Radio 4. Thrilling, opening lines of Courage's opium-fueled fantasy still sent a tingle down the spine. As a teenager, I was mesmerised by this vision of exotic and mysterious pleasures, but I had no idea that Courage was in fact writing about a historical figure, because Kublai Khan is a 13th century Chinese emperor, and Zanadu merely the English form of Shangdu, his imperial summer capital. Kublai Khan was the grandson of Genghis Khan, ruler of the Mongols from 1206 and terror of the world. Reeking havoc everywhere, Genghis Khan established the Mongol Empire, a superpower that ran from the Black Sea to the Sea of Japan and from Cambodia to the Arctic. Kublai Khan, his grandson, extended the empire and became emperor of China, which leads us to the objects for this programme. 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 a stately pleasure domes, but which spread in a matter of centuries from ground palaces to simple parlors all over the world. It's Chinese, blue and white, porcelain. We now think of blue and white as quintessentially Chinese, but as we'll discover it, this is not how it began. This archetypal Chinese aesthetic comes in fact from Iran. The fascinating thing about these fathers is that they are so beautiful and mysterious, and yet they seem tremendously familiar. If you say Chinese porcelain, this is what you think of, this white background and this brilliant blue colour, but it hasn't been there forever, it was a novelty at this period. A history of the world in a hundred objects. The David Vases. Porcelain from China. Made in 1351. The programme is this week look at high status objects from all over the world around 700 years ago. Objects which tell us about the taste and the ambitions, political and social, religious and intellectual of the people who owned them. Thanks to the long Chinese habit of writing on objects, we know exactly who made the two blue and white porcelain vases in this programme, which gods they were offered to, and indeed the very day on which they were dedicated. The importance of Chinese porcelain is hard to ever estimate. Admired and imitated for over a thousand years, its influence virtually every ceramic tradition in the world, and it's played a star role in cross-cultural exchanges. In Europe, blue and white porcelain is practically synonymous with China, and we've always associated it with the Ming dynasty. But it was the David Vases, now in the British Museum, that made us rethink this history. For they predate the Ming, and were in fact made under Kublai Khan's Mongol dynasty, known as the Yuan, who controlled all of China until the middle of the 14th century. 700 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' grandson Kublai 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 this Pax Mongolica that Marco Polo was able to travel from Italy to China, and then returned to tell Europe what he had seen. And one of the startling things he had seen was porcelain. The David Vases are so called because they were bought by Supersival David, whose collection of over one and a half thousand Chinese ceramics is now in a special gallery at the British Museum. We put the Vases right at the entrance, the gallery, to make it quite clear that they're the stars of the show. David acquired them from two separate private collections, and was able to reunite them in 1935. They're big, they're just over two feet high, and they're about eight inches across at the widest, with an elegant shape, narrowing at the top and the bottom, swelling into a full central body. Apparately floating between the white porcelain body and the clear glaze at the top lies the blue, made of cobalt, and painted in elaborate patterns and figures with great assurance. There are leaves and flowers at the foot and at the neck of the Vases, but the main body of each vase has a slender Chinese dragon flying around it, elongated, scaled, and bearded with piercing claws and surrounded by trailing clouds. At the neck are two handles in the shape of elephant heads. These two vases are obviously luxury porcelain production, made by artist Craftsmann delighting in their material. Porcelain is a special ceramic, fired at very high temperature, 1,200 to 1,400 degrees centigrade. The heat vitrifies the clay so that, like glass, it can hold liquid in contrast to porous earthenware, and the heat also makes it very tough. White, hard, and translucent, porcelain was admired and desired everywhere, well before the creation of blue and white. The very word porcelain comes to us from Marco Polo's description of his travels in Kublecán's China. The Italian porcelana, little piglet, is a slang word for cowrie shells. They do indeed look a little light, 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 cowrie shell, a porcelana. And so little piglets, porcelain, we've called it ever since. That's if we're not just calling it China. I don't think there's another country in the world whose name has simply become interchangeable with its defining export. The savagery of the Mongol invasion destabilized and destroyed local pottery industries across the Middle East, especially in Iran. So when peace returned, these became major markets for Chinese exports. And in these new markets, blue and white ware had long been popular. So the porcelain the Chinese made for them mirrored the local style, and Chinese potters used the Iranian blue pigment, cobalt, to meet local taste. The cobalt from Iran was known in China as Weiwei Qing, Muslim blue. Clear evidence that the blue and white tradition is Middle Eastern and not Chinese. Craig Clunus is an expert on Chinese cultural history. Iran and what's now Iraq are the kind of areas where this sort of coloring comes in. This is a technique that comes from elsewhere and therefore it tells us something about this period when China is unprecedentedly open to the rest of Asia as part of this huge empire of the Mongols, which stretches all the way from the Pacific, almost to the Mediterranean. Certainly, the openness to the rest of Asia is what brings about things like blue and white, and it probably had an impact on forms of literature. So from the point of view of cultural forms coming into being, the Yuan period is extraordinarily important. Among the happy consequences of this cultural openness are the David Vases. The crucial significance of the Vases is that as well as their decoration, they have inscriptions. Inscriptions that tell us that they were dedicated in the year 1351. In fact, on Tuesday the 13th of May, 1351. It's a level of precision that's wonderfully Chinese and it's proof positive that fine quality blue and white porcelain predates the Ming. But the inscriptions set as much more than that. There are slight differences between the inscriptions on the two Vases, but this is the translation of the one on the left. Jung Wanjin from Jintang Community, Dujia Village, Shunjong Township, Ushan County, Shinjo Circuit, a disciple of the Holy Gods, is pleased to offer a set comprising one incense burner and a pair of flower vases to General Hu Jing Ye at the original palace in Xin Yun. As a prayer for the protection and blessing of the whole family and for the peace of his sons and daughters. Carefully offered on an auspicious day in the fourth month, 11th year of the Ja Jung reign. There's a lot of information here. We're told that the Vases were purpose made to be offered as donations at a temple and that the name of their donor is Dujia Wanjin, who describes himself with great solemnity as a disciple of the Holy Gods. It gives his hometown Shunjong in what is now Jiangxi Province, a few hundred miles southwest of Shanghai. He was offering these two grand vases along with an incense burner. The three would have formed a typical set for an altar. The incense burner has been lost, or at least has not yet been found. The specific deity receiving the offering had only recently become a god. He's General Hu Jing Ye, a military figure of the 13th century, who was elevated to divine status because of his supernatural power and wisdom and his ability to foretell the future. Dujia Wanjin's altar set is offered in exchange for this new God's protection. Foreign rulers, the Mongols, foreign materials, Muslim blue, and foreign markets, Iran and Iraq, all played an essential part in the creation of what to many outside China is still the most Chinese of objects, blue and white, porcelain. Soon these ceramics were being exported from China in very large quantities, to Japan and Southeast Asia across the Indian Ocean to Africa and the Middle East, and far beyond that. Then it comes to Europe and the Dutch, adapted to their life. Author, Jenny Yuglu. And so it comes to Britain and we adapted to the forms of jugs we like, the plates we love and so on. It becomes translated, it's like a wonderful language, which is perpetually translated to the culture where it's arriving and is loved. People say it's a very sort of elemental thing. It's blue and white is the blue sky and the white clouds or the blue sea and the white sand, and behavioural psychologists who've looked at the way people react to colour, so that blue and white is seen as immensely serene and relaxing. But I think also it has to do with the great long history, thousands years of history and a way that the blue and white designs themselves seem to be mysterious and other and have their own stories as well. It's a combination of colour appeal and historical appeal. So eventually, centuries after its creation in Muslim Iran and its transformation in Mongol China, blue and white arrived in Europe and triumphed. Willow pattern, the style that many people think of when blue and white is mentioned, was invented in England in the 1790s by Thomas Minton and it was as much a fantasy view of China as co-ridges poem. It was an instant success and co-ridge may indeed even have been drinking his tea out of a Willow pattern cup as he emerged from his opium dream. Blue and white porcelain was the first truly global luxury product and one that could be infinitely adapted to suit all local tastes. The David Vases, the earliest dateable blue and white, were made as offerings to the gods. In the next programme, where with another high status object also used as a means of connecting with the supernatural, it's a ritual thrown from the Caribbean. You can see the object described in this programme close up on the "A History of the World" website, as well as hundreds of others from museums across the UK. And if you have an object with a history to tell, why not add it to our growing collection? Find all this at bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld