Tea, porcelain, and silk: Chinese exports to the West in the early modern period

Po, Ronald C. ORCID: 0000-0002-9678-0536 (2018) Tea, porcelain, and silk: Chinese exports to the West in the early modern period. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. (Submitted)

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Abstract

Tracing the social lives of tea, porcelain, and silk, it is discernible that the world had been living with commodities made in and exported from China for a fairly long period of time. Particularly, when tea slowly became more common in England during the 18th century, most Britons tended to purchase tea leaves planted in the Yangtze River Delta and the Fujian region. When Europeans first encountered Chinese porcelain, it was so fine, translucent, and superior to anything that they could possibly manufacture at the time. They thus concluded that it must be a magic substance and astonishingly called it “white gold.” The Western obsession about Chinese porcelain, in turn, encouraged Europeans to produce their own imitations in terms of both production processes and marketing strategies. When silkworm disease ruined European sericulture in the middle of the 19th century, Chinese silk, including silk textiles and spun and raw silks, fulfilled a need in a demanding Euro-American market. These examples, among many others, conceivably reveal that China has played a crucial role in the global history of the dissemination and consumption of commodities since the early modern period

Item Type:	Book Section
Official URL:	http://oxfordre.com/
Additional Information:	© 2018 Oxford University Press
Divisions:	International History
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions
Date Deposited:	23 Feb 2018 15:52
Last Modified:	24 Oct 2023 14:23
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/86853

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