It started somewhere between 45-100 million years ago when water running down the mountains to the lake began eroding rocks with a high silicone content. As the deposits built up, the tropical temperature and steady rainfall produced deep deposits of fine clay, rich in kaolinite.
Potters quickly discovered that the fine clay was excellent for producing high quality ceramic vessels. As trade in the region increased, the demand for these pots increased. By two thousand years ago, a permanent settlement was founded, and as the profitable trade increased, so did the size of the community.
Over time, the quality of the pottery grew. A thousand years after the community was first established, the artists learned that if the clay was fired at very high temperatures (well above 2000 degrees F), the local clay would turn into porcelain, a very hard and almost translucent form of pottery.
Over time, the artists learned that if the unfired pottery was painted with a special coating, called a slip, the fired porcelain would have a milky white finish, perfect for painting. If a cobalt blue paint was applied before firing, the resulting ceramic was strong, translucent porcelain with a beautiful deep blue design.
At first, those blue lines were a little fuzzy, making finely detailed drawings impossible, but by the 15th Century, the artists had discovered that by adding a small amount of manganese to the paint, fine blue lines could be produced, allowing for intricate and delicate paintings to be produced on the porcelain.
It was during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) that these ceramics reached the height of perfection and that small village had grown to the thriving commercial center known as Jingdezhen. By this point, the porcelain pottery was in high demand all over the world, particularly in Europe. In England, the name for these high-quality ceramics became synonymous for the country that exported it: China.
In 1602, almost two centuries after the pot had been created for the emperor, it was part of a large consignment of trade goods purchased by Portuguese merchants. Called Kraak, for the Carracks that brought the goods to Europe, the porcelain ceramics were loaded aboard the Santa Catarina for the long difficult journey back to Portugal around the southern tip of Africa. The voyage had hardly begun when three Dutch ships of the Dutch East India Company captured the ship off the coast of Singapore. When the Dutch sold the valuable contents in Amsterdam, the value of the Dutch East India Company went up 50%.
The prize sale included several hundred ounces of musk, twelve-hundred bales of raw silk, and hundreds of items of fine China. Among the purchasers of the ceramics were agents acting for James I, the King of England and among the items purchased for the monarch was the large vase with the cobalt blue dragon design.
From here, exactly what happened to the vase is a little hazy, but it was eventually part of the Nightingale estate at Lea Hurst in Derbyshire when Peter Nightingale died in 1815. Under the terms of his will, his estate passed to his niece, Mary Evans, who in turn left the estate to her son, William Shore. Under the terms of the will (and this only makes sense in old English Law), William inherited the house, the family fortune, and the name Nightingale. And yes, it is THAT Nightingale family—Florence was his daughter.
Now suddenly wealthy, Nightingale purchased Embley Park, a grand estate, and moved the family into the much larger home. It is likely that during this move, as items were packed, moved, unpacked and relocated in the new home, that the provenance of the blue and white porcelain vase was simply lost. It is also probable that no one in the family had any idea of its significance, since by the 19th Century, blue and white porcelain was being manufactured all over the world.
Sometime in the 1860’s the Nightingale family gifted the vase to a young couple upon their marriage, and like so many other wedding presents, it was kept by the family but not exactly cherished. According to the family history, it moved from room to room in the house and was generally used as storage.
In 2004, the house contained so many antiques that the family finally had a representative from Christie’s do an evaluation of the various odds and ends collected over the decades. The vase, not included on the list of items to be inventoried, was in the home’s hall, being used as an umbrella stand. At the insistence of the appraiser, it was evaluated by experts, and subsequently, in 2016, Christies sold the Ming vase at auction in for $20,447,642 to an undisclosed buyer in Hong Kong.
That is, undoubtedly, the highest price ever paid for an umbrella stand.
It is at this point that I should probably stop my story, however, I feel duty bound to continue with some important advice: How to tell if a vase is a genuine Ming vase. (After all, you, too, might inherit an umbrella stand one day.)
First—and I can’t stress this too much—if you ever find yourself in the position of having to determine whether or not a vase is actually made during the Ming Dynasty—it wasn’t. The chances of your finding a previously undiscovered priceless artifact at a garage sale are exactly equal to my chances of dying in a tsunami here in New Mexico.
But, miracles do happen, at least in books and on television, so I will gladly continue. If the vase is a blue/white piece of porcelain (and Ming vases can be any color, not just blue and white), look at that cobalt blue design on the vase. In the mining of both the cobalt and the manganese used to create that paint, some iron was inadvertently added. Over the last 500 years, that iron should have oxidized, giving the blue a slightly blackish hue (see photo).
Second, look at the foot of the vase, where the slip covering stops. Along the edge, the kaolin clay used to make the ceramic should have turned reddish brown during firing. Forgers frequently forget this since photographs of the bottom of artwork seldom appear in books or art catalogs.
Finally, feel the surface of the glazing. Modern kilns usually use coal, natural gas, or some other form of sulfur-bearing petroleum product. That sulfur, when heated to the temperatures necessary to fire the glaze, makes the glaze seem dry to the touch.
If the pottery you are being offered passes all three tests—still walk away. I just finished reading an article about the shops in Jingdezhen. It’s still a center of porcelain production but now it’s a thriving city of over a million people, who crank out near-perfect replicas of Ming Pottery for sale all over the world...
And Amazon will sell you an umbrella stand for $30.
It's not so much what you're made of, it's who you are connected with. It's like that in all societies that think well of aristocrats. These days it's politicians and celebrities. Sometimes it's a combination of the two. For instance, recently Joe Biden was discussing Venezuelan foreign policy with Sean Penn. Not everyone is impressed by Mr. Biden, whatever Chinese pottery he may have gotten in one of his under the table deals with President Ji. As for Sean Penn, Dinesh D'Souza's wife, an immigrant from Venezuela, she calls him Sean Pindejo to this day and is not interested in pottery that belonged to the actor. One man's treasure is another man's umbrella stand depending on what they think of the man in question.
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