Porcelain in Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century England
Porcelain is a white ceramic that originated in China and that incorporates kaolin clay.When Asian porcelains first appeared in Europe,Europeans were delighted and mystified by their lightness, hardness,and translucence (allowing light to pass through).Starting in the seventeenth century,Britain’s East India Company imported large quantities of goods from East Asia,with the volume of imported porcelain rising dramatically toward the end of that century and into the eighteenth.One reason for this increased importation of porcelain was the increasing popularity of the hot beverages coffee,chocolate, and tea.The earliest London coffeehouses date from the 1650s,and, though the first known advertisement for tea appeared in 1656,it was not imported by the East India Company for resale in Britain until 1678.The rising popularity of coffee drinking and tea drinking in Britain,and the vastly increased importation of Far East ceramics,are thus both phenomena that had their origins in high-class British social life during the last quarter of the seventeenth century.Being heavy and not susceptible to water damage,porcelain was packed underneath the very much lighter cargoes of tea brought by the East India Company.The histories of the two are thus closely intertwined, and the links extended from the act of importation to its sale-as porcelain dealers very often sold tea,coffee,and chocolate in addition to ceramics and glass-right through the final act of consumption.
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