Blue-and-white porcelain uses cobalt pigment to paint patterns on the body before a transparent glaze is applied and fired. Because the pattern lies beneath the glaze, it is an underglaze decoration. Origins, cobalt materials, and firing conditions can all affect the color. Dating an object generally requires considering form, decoration, materials, and archaeological context together.
Historical background
"Blue and white pottery" covers a wide range of white pottery and porcelain decorated under the glaze with a blue pigment, generally cobalt oxide. The decoration was commonly applied by hand, originally by brush painting, but nowadays by stencilling or by transfer-printing, though other methods of application have also been used. The cobalt pigment is one of the very few that can withstand the highest firing temperatures that are required, in particular for porcelain, which partly accounts for its long-lasting popularity. Historically, many other colours required overglaze decoration and then a second firing at a lower temperature to fix that.
The origin of the blue and white pottery is thought to lie in Iraq, when craftsmen in Basra sought to imitate imported white Chinese stoneware with their own tin-glazed, white pottery and added decorative motifs in blue glazes. Such Abbasid-era pieces have been found in present-day Iraq dating to the 9th century AD, decades after the opening of a direct sea route from Iraq to China. According to Jonathan Bloom, these 9th and 10th century Iraqi examples were the first blue-and-white wares.
Origin and development
Cobalt blue glaze became popular in Islamic pottery during the Abbasid Caliphate, when the cobalt was mined near Kashan, Oman, and Northern Hejaz. Blue-and-white wares were first produced in the 9th century in Iraq. Following an analysis of the literature regarding blue-and-white ceramics, Edwards and Colomban (2025) characterized the decoration style as an Abbasid innovation. Early Chinese craftspeople used blue-and-white porcelain to replicate the styles of Islamic pottery and metalwork. Even earlier, during the eighth century, Chinese potters adopted motifs like lotus scrolls directly from Persian silverwork.
The use of cobalt as an underglaze color was introduced to China from Iraq, where Abbasid potters had been using it on white glazed earthenware since the 9th century. In China, it was first applied to earthenware during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) and subsequently to porcelain. Shards of blue-and-white porcelain from the late Tang dynasty have been discovered at the Huangye and Baihe kiln sites in Gongyi, Henan Province. Tang period blue-and-white is more rare than Song blue-and-white and was unknown before 1985. The Tang pieces are not porcelain however, but rather earthenwares with greenish white slip, using cobalt blue pigments.
The only three pieces of complete "Tang blue and white" in the world were recovered in 1998 from the Belitung shipwreck in Indonesia and later sold to Singapore. It appears that the technique was forgotten for some centuries.
Textual and archaeological evidence suggests that blue-and-white wares may have been produced during the Song dynasty, although the identification of Song dynasty blue-and-white pieces remains the subject of disagreement among experts.
14th-century development
In the early 20th century, the development of the classic blue and white Jingdezhen ware porcelain was dated to the early Ming period, but consensus now agrees that these wares began to be made around 1300–1320, and were fully developed by the mid-century, as shown by the David Vases dated 1351, which are cornerstones for this chronology. There are still those arguing that early pieces are mis-dated, and in fact go back to the Southern Song. Still, most scholars continue to reject this view.
In the early 14th century, mass production of fine, translucent, blue and white porcelain started at Jingdezhen, sometimes called the porcelain capital of China. This development was due to the combination of Chinese techniques and Islamic trade. The new ware was made possible by the export of cobalt from Persia (called Huihui qing,, "Islamic blue" or "Muslim blue"), combined with the translucent white quality of Chinese porcelain, derived from kaolin. Cobalt was so prized that manufacturers in Jingdezhen considered cobalt a precious commodity with about twice the value of gold. Motifs also draw inspiration from Islamic decorations. A large portion of these blue-and-white wares were then shipped to Southwest-Asian markets through the Muslim traders based in Guangzhou.