Vermeer's Hat (9 page)
Authors: Timothy Brook
Could the porcelain have been dropped on top of the wreck by later ships lightening their load while at anchor? It is possible,
but there was too much porcelain in one place, and when pieces were brought to the surface, their styles and dates indicated
that they were produced during the reign of the Wanli emperor, which came to an end in 1620. All the evidence—other than the
ship’s manifest—points to this being cargo from the
White Lion
. What the explosion destroyed, it paradoxically saved. Had the carefully packed bales of porcelain made it to the docks of
Amsterdam as they were supposed to, they would have been sold and resold, chipped and cracked, and finally thrown away. This
is the ordinary fate of almost all the porcelain that made it back to the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. There are
pieces scattered about the world in museums and private collections, but they survive as individual remnants cut loose from
the circumstances that got them to Europe and separated from the shipments of which they were a part. The explosion of the
White Lion
inadvertently saved this particular shipment from this fate. True, most of the pieces recovered are broken, but ironically
enough, more have survived than would have made it through the four centuries between 1613 and the present. They may be damaged,
but they are still together (now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam), and that means that they can show us what a shipment of
porcelain in the early seventeenth century looked like.
THE FIRST CHINESE PORCELAIN TO reach Europe amazed all who saw or handled it. Europeans could think only of crystal when pressed
to describe the stuff. The glazed surfaces were hard and lustrous, the underglaze designs sharply defined, the colors brilliantly
vivid. The walls of the finest pieces were so thin that you could see the shadow of your hand on the other side when you lifted
a plate or cup to the light.
The style that most caught the attention of Europeans was blue-and-white: thin white porcelain painted with cobalt blue and
coated in a perfectly transparent glaze. This style was actually a late development in the history of Chinese ceramics. The
potters of Jingdezhen, the kiln city in the inland province of Jiangxi where imperial orders were regularly filled, developed
the technology to fire true porcelain only in the fourteenth century. Porcelain production requires driving kiln temperatures
up to 1,300 degrees Celsius, high enough to turn the glazing mixture to a glassy transparency and fuse it with the body.
Trapped permanently between the two were the blue pictures and patterns that so captured the eye. The closest European approximation
was faïence, earthenware fired at a temperature of 900 degrees Celsius and coated with a tin oxide glaze. Faïence has the
superficial appearance of porcelain, but lacks its thinness and translucence. Europeans learned the technique from Islamic
potters in the fifteenth century, who had developed it to make cheap import substitutes that could compete with Chinese wares.
It was not until 1708 that a German alchemist was able to reproduce the technique for making true porcelain in a town outside
Dresden called Meissen, which soon was also synonymous with fine porcelain.
European buyers were delighted by the effect of blue on white. Although we think of deep cobalt blue lines and figures on
a pure white background as quintessentially Chinese, it is a borrowed, or at least an adapted, aesthetic. At the time Chinese
potters began firing true porcelain, China was under Mongol rule. The Mongols also controlled Central Asia, enabling goods
to move overland from one end of their continental empire to the other. Persian taste had long favored Chinese ceramics, which
had been available there since the eighth century. Unable to match the whiteness of Chinese ceramics, their potters developed
a technique of masking their gray clay with an opaque white glaze that looked Chinese. Onto this white base they painted blue
decorative figures, using local cobalt for the color. The effect was striking. Once Persia and China were more directly linked
by Mongol rule in the thirteenth century, Chinese potters had much better access to the Persian market. Ever sensitive to
the demands of that market, they adjusted the look of their products to appeal to Persian taste. Part of this adaptation was
to incorporate cobalt decoration into their designs. As Chinese cobalt is paler than Persian, the potters of Jingdezhen began
importing Persian cobalt to produce a color they thought would appeal to Persian buyers.
Blue-and-white porcelain emerged from this long process of innovation. It sold well in Persia, in part because of the Koran’s
ban on eating from gold or silver plates. The wealthy wanted to be able to serve guests on expensive tableware, and if they
were blocked from presenting food on precious metals, they needed something as lovely and as expensive but that wasn’t available
in the time of the Koran. Porcelain from Jingdezhen fit the bill. Mongol and Chinese buyers were also charmed by the look
of this porcelain. What we recognize as “china” today was born from this chance intercultural crossover of material and aesthetic
factors, which transformed ceramic production worldwide. Syrian potters in the court of Tamerlane, for instance, started making
their products look Chinese early in the fifteenth century. As the global trade in ceramics expanded in the sixteenth century
to Mexico, the Middle East, and Iberia, and to England and the Netherlands in the seventeenth, potters in all of these places
followed suit. Everyone tried—though for a long while they also failed—to imitate the look and feel of Chinese blue-and-white.
The ceramic stalls of seventeenth-century bazaars outside of China were cluttered with second-rate imitations that fell far
short of the real thing.
Dutch readers first learned about Chinese porcelain in 1596 from Jan Huygen van Linschoten, a Dutchman who went to India in
Portuguese employ. Van Linschoten’s best-selling
Itinerario
inspired the coming generation of Dutch world traders. Van Linschoten saw Chinese porcelains in the markets of Goa. Though
he never went to China, he managed to pick up reasonably sound information about the commodity. “To tell of the porcelains
made there”—he is speaking of China on the basis of what he learned in Goa—“is not to be believed, and those that are exported
yearly to India, Portugal and New Spain and elsewhere!” Van Linschoten learned that the porcelain was produced “inland”—as
Jingdezhen was—and that only the second-rate stuff was exported. The best pieces, “so exquisite that no crystalline glass
is to be compared with them,” were kept at home for the court.
Indian traders had been bringing Chinese porcelain to the subcontinent since at least the fifteenth century. They acquired
it from Chinese merchants in Southeast Asia, who brought it from ports along the southeast coast of China, to which ceramics
dealers had in turn shipped it out from the interior. The development of a maritime trade route around Africa suddenly opened
up a market in Europe. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to acquire Chinese porcelain in Goa, though soon enough they
would extend their trade routes to south China where they could deal directly with Chinese wholesalers. This was the route
that the Dutch wanted to get in on, and soon enough they did. But the first major shipment of Chinese porcelain to Amsterdam
was not a Dutch enterprise. It was the result of the Dutch-Portuguese rivalry on the high seas, off St. Helena no less. Eleven
years before the sinking of the
White Lion
, a fleet of Dutch ships seized the Portuguese
San Iago
there in 1602. The
San Iago
was captured without difficulty and taken to Amsterdam with all its cargo. Onto the docks of that city emerged the first great
trove of china to reach Holland, and buyers from all over Europe fought for a piece. The Dutch called it
kraakporselein
, “carrack porcelain,” in acknowledgment of the Portuguese carrack from which it had been taken.
The next great porcelain cargo to arrive in the Netherlands came the same way the following year. The
Santa Catarina
was captured off Johore in the Strait of Malacca, the sea-lane connecting the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea. This was
the most famous seizure of the new century. The
Santa Catarina
was carrying a hundred thousand pieces of porcelain weighing a total of over fifty tons. (It also held twelve hundred bales
of Chinese silk, which sold well because Italy’s silk production had failed that year.) Buyers for the crowned heads of northern
Europe flocked to Amsterdam with orders to pay whatever the going price might be.
The seizures of the
San Iago
and the
Santa Catarina
, and the sinking of the
White Lion
, were skirmishes in the larger war the Dutch were waging not so much against the Portuguese as against the Spanish. The Portuguese
were the junior partners of the Spanish during the period 1580–1640, when their crowns were joined, and that in Dutch eyes
made them legitimate targets of attack as well. But Spain was the arch-enemy: Spain was the state that had occupied the Low
Countries in the sixteenth century and had used spectacular violence to suppress the Dutch independence movement. Even though
the truce Spain and the United Provinces signed in 1609 ended direct hostilities in the Low Countries for a time, outside
Europe the struggle between the Spanish kingdom and the Dutch republic continued to be waged.
The rivalry being played out on the high seas—the Spanish not unreasonably called it “piracy”—had to do with more than the
Dutch struggle for independence at home, however. It had to do with redefining the global order. Its roots have to be traced
back to 1493, the year after Columbus’s first voyage to the West Indies. In light of the new lands discovered across the Atlantic,
the pope decreed that same year that Spain should enjoy exclusive jurisdiction over every newly discovered land lying to the
west of a north-south meridian drawn 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Morocco, and that Portugal
could claim every land to the east of that line. All other European states were excluded from any right to trade into or possess
the newly discovered regions. Spain and Portugal altered the terms of the papal bull of 1493 the following year by concluding
the Treaty of Tordesillas. This agreement moved the line 270 leagues farther west, possibly because the Portuguese knew, or
at least suspected, that a piece of South America might protrude east of that line (they were correct: it was Brazil).
The Treaty of Tordesillas said nothing about where the line of demarcation should fall on the far side of the globe, since
neither of the treaty parties had yet gone there. So Portugal and Spain quickly set off in opposite directions on their race
around the globe, Portugal via the Indian Ocean and Spain via the Pacific. They knew that China was there on the opposite
side of the globe, and that whoever could establish a presence in that part of the world stood to gain the richest prize of
all. The Chinese government was not enthusiastic about letting either state establish a foothold on Chinese soil. Foreigners
were permitted to stay in China only as temporary visitors who came as members of visiting diplomatic embassies. The concept
of diplomatic embassy was sufficiently elastic, and understood to be so on both sides, that embassies from neighboring states
that came to submit “tribute” to the Chinese throne operated as de facto trade delegations. Ambassadors were allowed to engage
in trade so long as the volume was kept within modest limits. Traders had to be ambassadors, and that is what the Portuguese
wanted to be. They reached China before the Spanish did, and made strong efforts to open official channels of communication
with the Chinese court. Consistently rebuffed, they had to make do with illegal trading in the lee of offshore islands. An
unofficial agreement in the middle of the sixteenth century at last gave them a foothold on a slender peninsula on the south
coast known as Macao, and there they dug in, establishing a tiny colonial base from which to handle trade with both China
and Japan.
At the turn of the seventeenth century, VOC ships were also in the South China Sea, probing along the coast north of Macao
as far as Fujian Province for a place where they could set up trade with China. As the Chinese government already had a trading
arrangement with one set of “Franks,” as they then called Europeans (they picked up the term from the Arabs), in Macao, it
was not interested in making concessions to another set. But private Chinese merchants were eager to trade with any Franks,
and some officials were willing to come to an understanding if the price was right. Most notorious of the Chinese officials
was Gao Cai, an imperial eunuch in charge of collecting maritime customs duties. As customs receipts went directly into the
accounts of the imperial household rather than the ministry of finance, Eunuch Gao bent the rules of the bureaucracy for the
benefit of his master. In 1604, he set up a private trading entrepôt in the lee of an offshore island where his agents could
trade with the Dutch in return for handsome gifts for himself and the emperor. The provincial governor soon got wind of the
scheme and sent in the navy to curtail the eunuch’s smuggling.
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The absence of strong states in Southeast Asia, compared to China, made that region a more promising region for the Dutch
to find a foothold. The Spanish (based at Manila in the Philippines) and the Portuguese were too few to dominate the thousands
of islands in that zone, so the Dutch moved in swiftly, seizing what were called the Spice Islands from the Portuguese in
1605. Four years later, the VOC set up its first permanent trading post at Bantam on the far west end of the island of Java.
After capturing Jakarta to the east, the company moved its headquarters to this location, renaming the town Batavia. Holland
now had a base on the other side of the globe from which to challenge the Iberian monopoly on Asian trade. The new arrangement
worked well for the company. The value of Dutch imports from the region grew by almost 3 percent annually.