Why Blue and White Porcelain Read as Refined, Even Though Millions of Pieces Existed
Basic economics says abundance kills status. Flood a market with millions of identical units, and the thing stops signaling anything except that a lot of people own one. Blue and white porcelain broke that rule for roughly four centuries. Dutch East India Company ships alone delivered three million pieces to Holland between 1602 and 1682. They distributed twelve million more across Asia, and none of that volume stopped a well-placed vase from reading as refinement in a European drawing room or a Ming court. The mechanism behind that isn’t mysterious once you look at how the supply was actually structured, and it has almost nothing to do with how many pieces existed in total. The Real Answer: There Was Never Just One Tier The Imperial Kilns That Destroyed Their Own Product on Purpose Jingdezhen ran imperial kilns, known as guan yao, at Zhushan specifically to supply the Ming and Qing courts, separate from the commercial kilns supplying everyone else. By 1402, twelve of these kilns opera...
