'The Emperor's Broken Pots' at Sotheby's

LONDON: An exhibition of pots smashed in an early example of quality control by the Chinese craftsmen who made them 500 years ago, will be held at Sotheby's, London, from September 21-22, this year.

"The Emperor's Broken Pots" will be the first major art exhibition from mainland China to be held in London for twenty years.

It is sponsored by Asia House, London, an organization founded to promote cultural and economic links between Europe and Asia.

The exhibition consists of some 150 bowls, vases, stem cups, wine cups, flower pots, kewers, dishes and other vessels, reconstructed from shards excavated from the reject piles of the imperial kiln site at Jingdezhen in Southeastern China. Many of the shapes and decorations of these pieces have never been seen before.

The pots are all of the Chenghua period (1465-87) and represent some of the finest and rarest of all types of Chinese porcelain. They were made exclusively for the Emperor during the Chenghua period of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and almost all the pieces in the exhibition bear his reign remark.

Quality

Rigorous quality controls meant that any piece which emerged from the kiln with the slightest flaw or was a trial of a new shape, color or pattern that failed to please, was smashed and cast aside on to a mound of shards.

The number of pots which passed the quality control tests at the kilns was relatively small. If the emperor ordered new wine cups the craftsmen might produce 500,000 in order to chose the best 100,000. The rest would be rejected and broken. Cracks radiating out in a star from the center of some of the vessels suggest that they often did this with a single hammer blow.

The Jingdezhen ceramic Archeological Research Institute began excavating the reject heaps in 1987.

"Their findings have been a revelation," said Julia Thompson, Chairman of Sotheby's Asia and the West's leading expert on Chenghua porcelain.

Mr Thompson recalls visiting the excavation site: "Even while I was there they were digging up shapes, colors and decorations never seen before. Almost every day something new and surprising comes out of the ground."

Mr Thompson has devoted the last 7 years to the study of Chenghua porcelain. Of the pieces which passed the test and were allowed out from the imperial kilns, there are only around 500 still in existence. Mr Thompson 's list of these pieces is included in the catalog of the present exhibition.

As Chenghua porcelain was made strictly for use by the Emperor and his court, very little is to be found outside the Imperial collection, now partly in the National Museum in Taipei and the Palace Museum in Beijing.

"Since the excavations began in 1987, we have learnt more about Chenghua porcelain than was gleaned by scholars studying the small body of existing material in the previous 100 years," Mr Thompson said.

"The quantity of shards is staggering. It would take more than an entire generation to reconstruct all of them into pots".

He added: "Only a small proportion are being stuck back together and we are extremely privileged to have so many of these pieces here."

Chenghua

Ignoring the obvious joins where the pieces have been fitted together like a jigsaw, the pots exhibit all the qualities for which Chenghua porcelain is renowned. The clay is impeccably fine, smooth and tactile. The colors are strong and appear in a variety of exquisite designs.

All types of Chenghua porcelain are represented in the exhibition, including blue and white wares, rarer underglaze copper-red wares, monochromes in almost every color including the famous "Imperial Yellow" and celadons imitating the blue-green glazes of the earlier Song dynasty.

Of Chenghua polychromes, the most famous are the type known as "doucai", meaning "matched colors". On these pieces jewel-like enamel colors have been applied over the glaze in a pattern which perfectly co-ordinates with the cobalt blue underneath.

This will be the first exhibition of excavated Imperial porcelain to be held anywhere in the West. Previously, Chenghua wares from the Jingdezhen excavations have been exhibited only at the Tsui Museum in Hong Kong and at the Idemitsu Museum in Japan.

The town of Jingdezhen has enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the production of porcelain in China from the Ming dynasty onwards. Productions continues even to this day but the quality and innovations achieved during the 23-year Chenghua period have never been surpassed.

As the Ming scholar, Shen Defu, noted" Among the porcelains of the present dynasty, those pointed with blue motifs on a white ground and those decorated with five-color enamels are the best ever produced in our history. The Xuande ones were once deemed the most precious but recently their supremacy has been taken over by the Chenghua pieces."

-- Sotheby's