Bowl

Vietnamese Ceramics

In Vietnam, as in Thailand, ceramics were made both for domestic use and for export. Vietnamese potters had access to finer clays than their Thai counterparts, however, and, unlike the Thais, the Vietnamese made use of underglaze painting in cobalt to produce blue-andwhite ware.

Chinese blue-and-white ceramics became so popular throughout Asia in the 1300s and 1400s that other countries, like Vietnam, began to produce similar wares to capture part of the market. The development and dating of such ceramics in Vietnam is as yet poorly understood. The only anchor point is a Vietnamese blue-and-white bottle in the former Turkish imperial collection inscribed with a date equivalent to 1450.

In the early 1990s a sunken ship dating from about 1450–1500 was found off the Vietnamese coast near Hoi An. The ship carried more than 250,000 Vietnamese ceramic vessels, suggesting the huge scale of the trade in ceramics.

Even though the shapes and decorative motifs of Vietnamese and Chinese blue-and-white wares are sometimes similar, certain features allow them to be distinguished from each other. First, Vietnamese blue-and-white is high-fired stoneware, not porcelain, as Chinese examples are. Next, the white of Vietnamese blue-and-white is usually not the crisp white of Chinese wares but a soft, creamy white. Finally, some Vietnamese shapes, such as that of the lobed tile on the back wall of this case, and some motifs, such as the four-petaled “begonia flower” on the small jar in this case, have no counterparts in Chinese blue-and-white wares.