Asian pottery asian porcelain

Chinese ceramics show a continuous development since pre-dynastic times and are one of the most significant forms of Chinese art and ceramics globally. The first pottery was made during the Palaeolithic era. Chinese ceramics range from construction materials such as bricks and tiles, to hand-built pottery vessels fired in bonfires or kilns , to the sophisticated Chinese porcelain wares made for the imperial court and for export. Porcelain was a Chinese invention and is so identified with China that it is still called "china" in everyday English usage.

Chinese pottery , also called Chinese ceramics , objects made of clay and hardened by heat: earthenware , stoneware, and porcelain , particularly those made in China. Nowhere in the world has pottery assumed such importance as in China, and the influence of Chinese porcelain on later European pottery has been profound. The earliest evidence for art in any form in ancient China consists of crude cord-marked pottery and artifacts decorated with geometric designs found in Mesolithic sites in northern China and in the Guangdong-Guangxi regions. The dating for prehistoric culture in China is still very uncertain, but this material is probably at least 7, or 8, years old. The art of the Neolithic Period represents a considerable advance. The Yangshao Painted Pottery culture, named after the first Neolithic site discovered in , had its centre around the eastern bend of the Huang He Yellow River , and it is now known to have extended across northern China and up into Gansu province. Yangshao pottery consists chiefly of full-bodied funerary storage jars made by the coiling, or ring , method.

Chinese ceramic ware is an artform that has been developing since the dynastic periods. The first types of ceramics were made about ten to eleven thousand years ago. The history of Chinese ceramics began some eight thousand years ago with the crafting of hand-molded earthenware vessels. Soon after, in the late neolithic period, the potter's wheel was invented facilitating the production of more uniform vessels. The sophistication of these early Chinese potters is best exemplified by the legion of terracotta warriors found in the tomb of the First Qin Emperor r.

The toughness, strength, and translucence of porcelain, relative to other types of pottery , arises mainly from vitrification and the formation of the mineral mullite within the body at these high temperatures. Though definitions vary, porcelain can be divided into three main categories: hard-paste , soft-paste and bone china. The category that an object belongs to depends on the composition of the paste used to make the body of the porcelain object and the firing conditions. Porcelain slowly evolved in China and was finally achieved depending on the definition used at some point about 2, to 1, years ago, then slowly spread to other East Asian countries, and finally Europe and the rest of the world.