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The emergence of blue-and-white porcelain in the fourteenth century, during China’s Mongol Yuan and Ming dynasty, is arguably the most important development in the global history of ceramics. The refined, artistic creation of blue-and-white porcelain, which originated from a Middle Eastern process of painting on ceramics with a cobalt-blue pigment, was made possible by the meeting of Samarra-blue and Jingdezhen kaolinite, but especially the cultural envoys that bought these elements together. Pottery is therefore, according to Henry Glassie, “the most intense of the arts” for it “creates relations –relations between nature and culture, between the individual and society, between utility and beauty.” (2000). During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, while blue-and-white porcelain production was gracing the prosperity of Ming dynasty China, Isnik ware, which represents the technological and artistic peak of ceramic production in the Islamic world, was being produced in Ottoman Turkey in imitation of it. Porcelain with an underglaze of Samarra-blue—a pure source of cobalt oxide imported from the Islamic world, including the Middle East, Central Asia, and possibly Indonesia (Sumatra)—was produced and exported in large quantities only after maritime trade was greatly expanded by Chinese navigator Zhenghe’s first exploration of the Indian Ocean and Africa, in 1405. Subsequently, the establishment of the Fuliang Porcelain Bureau during the Yuan dynasty formally marked the beginning of production of imperial porcelain in Jingdezhen, which became one of the most advanced porcelain-production sites in the world.
This paper examines the localization of Islamic culture in southeast China as represented through blue-and-white porcelain and its cultural envoys. Most studies of this porcelain focus on comparing color and design, but this study focuses on cultural envoys such as potters, merchants, scholars, and administrators, who were involved in producing Jingdezhen blue-and-white porcelain historically, and those who are part of the contentious process of artistic exchange and creations of Islamic culture in the region today. This paper includes interviews and other ethnographic data from Jingdezhen and Mount Lu for bridging the historical and modern inquiries.