纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 064大卫对瓶（4）（在线收听）

Porcelain is a special ceramic fired at very high temperature: 1200-1400 degrees centigrade. The heat vitrifies the clay, so that like glass it can hold liquid, in contrast to porous earthenware. And the heat also makes it very tough. White, hard and translucent, porcelain was admired and desired everywhere, well before the creation of blue-and-white.

The very word 'porcelain' comes to us from Marco Polo's description of his travels in Qubilai Khan's China. The Italian 'porcellana', 'little piglet', is a slang word for cowrie shells. They do indeed look a little like curled-up piglets. And the only thing that Marco Polo could think of, to give his readers an idea of the shell-like sheen of the hard, fine ceramics that he saw in China, was a cowrie shell, a 'porcellana'. And so 'little piglets', porcelain, we've called it ever since - that's if we're not just calling it china. I don't think there's another country in the world whose name has simply become interchangeable with its defining export.

The savagery of the Mongol invasion destabilised and destroyed local pottery industries across the Middle East, especially in Iran. So when peace returned, these became major markets for Chinese exports. And in these new markets blue-and-white ware had long been popular. So the porcelain the Chinese made for them mirrored the local style, and Chinese potters used the Iranian blue pigment, cobalt, to meet local taste. The cobalt from Iran was known in China as 'huihui qing' - 'Muslim blue' - clear evidence that the blue-and-white tradition is Middle Eastern and not Chinese. Here's Craig Clunas, an expert on Chinese cultural history: