(Roughly) Daily

‘I am not yet so infected with the contagion of China-fancy’, wrote Samuel Johnson in a letter in September 1777, ‘as to like any thing at that rate which can so easily be broken’. At the time, the craze for Chinese export porcelain – ceramics mass-produced in China for foreign markets – had reached epidemic proportions in the Western world: a ‘contagion of China-fancy’. Over 70 million pieces entered Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and customers from London to Lisbon were desperate for more. The most afflicted were the ‘porcelain sick’ royals and aristocrats, who coated their palace walls, floors and ceilings in ‘white gold’. Patient zero was August the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony. His Porzellankrankheit was so acute that he amassed a collection of nearly 30,000 pieces and imprisoned the alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger until he figured out porcelain’s secret recipe, which had been closely guarded by the Chinese for centuries.

Export porcelain fused two worlds – producer and consumer, East and West – establishing a relationship that continues to shape the way the world works today…

How Chinese porcelain became a worldwide sensation, changing tastes and the global economy: “White Gold.”

See also: “The European Obsession with Porcelain.”

[Image above: source]

* from a Tang Dynasty (618-907) poem describing the Emperor’s porcelain tea cups

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As we handle with care, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972, after President Richard Nixon’s successful visit to China, that Beijing gave the National Zoo a pair of giant pandas, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing.  (The U.S. sent China a pair of musk oxen.)

On that first day, nearly 20,000 people stood in long lines to catch a glimpse of North America’s first pandas; in their initial year at the zoo, the pair attracted more than 1 million visitors.

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