Chances are pretty good! The Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore has a shipwreck of mass-produced pottery from ~830CE (salvaged 1998) on display and it is AMAZING. They salvaged ~50k bowls that had been tightly packed in jars for shipping with straw (see pic!) and they looked brand new. - ThreadSky

rahaeli.bsky.social • 246 days ago

Chances are pretty good! The Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore has a shipwreck of mass-produced pottery from ~830CE (salvaged 1998) on display and it is AMAZING. They salvaged ~50k bowls that had been tightly packed in jars for shipping with straw (see pic!) and they looked brand new.

Comments

fidelioscabinet.bsky.social•242 days ago

These reminded me of something & I was finally able to dig it out of long-term memory. Have you ever heard of the Steamboat Arabia Museum? It’s the salvage from a steamboat that sank in the Missouri River in 1856. Lots of freight for stores on the frontier…

https://www.1856.com/

rahaeli.bsky.social•242 days ago

Ooooh

fidelioscabinet.bsky.social•242 days ago

So much stuff. Hardware. Housewares. Gourmet canned goods. Toiletries. Clothing. Shoes. Everything they’d want in a frontier store.

karlgalle.bsky.social•242 days ago

That's such a great museum! Discovered it when I spent six months in Kansas City a number of years back.

fidelioscabinet.bsky.social•246 days ago

The ceramics were ideal ballast—heavy enough to do a decent job as ballast and unlikely to be damaged by water lurking deep down in the ship. They’d pack the tea & textiles higher up where they’d stay dry.

eixelra.bsky.social•246 days ago

Bowls that last from thousands and thousands of years ago? Definition of fine China.

rahaeli.bsky.social•246 days ago

Shipping pottery long distance via ocean was really common, so there are A LOT of shipwrecks with, like, the equivalent of corellware. The museum had an exhibit of some of the ~50k bowls they salvaged from that ship and it's FASCINATING how modern they look

rahaeli.bsky.social•246 days ago

I wandered that gallery for hours just marveling at the quality of the work: clearly mass produced with standard designs, but also you could see the human work and skill in each one

brookass.bsky.social•246 days ago

that is EXTREMELY cool!!!

revanche.bsky.social•246 days ago

Whoa, that's amazing stuff. Those pictures are beautiful.

grumpymartian.bsky.social•246 days ago

oh damn. OMG they were packing the dishes in large earthenware pots!!! That explains the shipwreck sherds from the Spanish Galleons too. I'd assumed the earthenware was for shipping liquids or other things. It makes so much more sense they were packing the dishes in them at the factories!!!

rahaeli.bsky.social•246 days ago

Yes!! Sometimes in wooden barrels (which mostly rot away, so you just get the pottery lying on the ocean floor still stacked like it had been packaged) but the large vessel method was apparently more protective

grumpymartian.bsky.social•246 days ago

and I mean, they had all this leftover clay remnants they could just slop all together and use to make them. And these factories existed for centuries and centuries. I got to look at someone's 30+ years of beachcombed sherds of a Manilla galleon wreck and since my ceramics knowledge was +

grumpymartian.bsky.social•246 days ago

related to Mayan pottery, I was more interested in the earthenware stuff that was mixed among the easier to spot porcelain, to the point this one guy's collection may be the only one to have collected a lot of it for this specific wreck. It's just so unremarkable and harder to discern from rocks

blueglow.bsky.social•246 days ago

This is from the Seattle Art Museum. I love how the mass-produced porcelain has been transformed into a chaotic sculpture.

rikibeth.bsky.social•246 days ago

made by humans, not the pattern blorper

rahaeli.bsky.social•246 days ago

They actually did have templates they used for the designs (according to the cards at least!) but clearly a few of the painters said "nah, I'm bored, imma get a bit creative", heh

rikibeth.bsky.social•246 days ago

but the templates probably weren’t entrancingly squishy

rahaeli.bsky.social•246 days ago

I took SO MANY inspiration photos for our own pottery!

tigerspot.bsky.social•246 days ago

Would purchase.

rahaeli.bsky.social•246 days ago

I took SO MANY PICTURES since we were taking pottery classes at the time and always needed decoration inspiration, heh

wraithe.bsky.social•246 days ago

I keep looking but I can’t find the store page to buy these, do you have a direct link? 😂

thevagabondtabby.bsky.social•243 days ago

Yeah, I've seen basically that at Mitsuwa. Hadn't thought of it as corellware but that's about the right parallel, innit?

Now I REALLY want a shipwreck bowl. They've got enough of them, they can sell a couple, right? Right?

(thanks for the pics, NEATO)

rahaeli.bsky.social•243 days ago

Yes, it totally is! Like, they were made by humans and people obviously took pride in their work, but they were totally intended for mass use, not something rare and precious. It's a mark of how advanced China was with ceramics production at the time and I find it fascinating!

convolver.bsky.social•243 days ago

Still amazing that the Han developed mass production, quality control, manufacturing, and logistics that are recognizably modern even today. The past is never so foreign as we might think.

rahaeli.bsky.social•243 days ago

I want one tooooo, I love the bird motifs ones in particular.

thevagabondtabby.bsky.social•243 days ago

I don't know how I'd even pick o.0

rahaeli.bsky.social•243 days ago

Right!? Like, I kind of want one of the ones where the glazing is a little bit janky, just to cherish the human imperfections!

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply