This article was submitted by Art Wong, webmaster for www.gombenn.org.
It’s been more than 30 years now since I made my one, and only visit to my father’s home in China. My father, Bing K. Wong (AKA Wong Park Dung or 黄柏宗), lived his first 20 years there in Gom Benn’s Wo Hing Village.
I don’t remember him telling us much about his life growing up. That wasn’t his way. He didn’t talk about books he read, songs he sang, or pictures he drew.
On that cold winter day, my father chatted with a few of the villagers as my kids and I climbed a ladder inside the house, up to a loft and looked down on the meal they had prepared for us. My father must have had many, many meals there. But that day, it was so chilly we left without eating.
Forgotten Porcelains
There isn’t much more I recall about our visit, except recently, as I read Laura Ng’s dissertation about Gom Benn yet again, I tried to imagine her digging through the archaeological trash in Gom Benn, examining the broken ceramics. I don’t know why, but I remembered I had some of that same tableware that Laura found. In fact, I had returned home to the U.S. with four of my father’s old porcelain bowls.
Forgive me for stashing them away in my garage all these years. Old rice bowls are just rice bowls, right? Well, no, these porcelain bowls are pretty special.
For hundreds of years, wealthy Europeans lusted for blue-and-white porcelain as if it were white gold. My bowls aren’t fine china – and they wouldn’t fetch a fortune at an art auction – but they are priceless nonetheless.
Pieces of a Story
Like Laura’s Stanford University dissertation, my father’s immigration papers, my uncle Bing T. Wong’s photos, and Chi Tung’s family trees, my porcelain bowls are another of the puzzle pieces that tell us just a little more about the story of our ancestors who came from Gom Benn.
Let me start with a confession: I’ve read Laura’s 300-page dissertation for her Ph.D. in Anthropology several times. And each time I’ve skipped over the 50 or so pages that she devotes to ceramics. She describes her findings on the archaeological trash in Gom Benn, mostly pieces of tableware, and compares them to the digs at the San Bernardino and Riverside Chinatowns.
I just didn’t get it. It was like my visits to the British Museum in London. Another confession: I go to museums everywhere. At the British Museum they have thousands of pieces of exquisite Chinese porcelain on shelf after shelf. What’s the big deal?
Like iPhones
It’s all like an archaeological dig a century from now under an Apple store where they built a museum with shelves and shelves of iPhones. Would the future me understand that iPhones were once upon a time a big, big deal?
Chinese porcelain was revolutionary, a leap in ceramic technology that Europe would not achieve for nearly a millennium. It was an unrivaled luxury commodity with a global impact on culture and economics. More like a Hermes Birkin handbag than a LaBuBu collectible doll.
Today our coffee cups, tableware, bathroom sinks, tubs and toilet bowls are porcelain.
Innovation Central
In the ancient world, in the West, alchemists dreamed of making gold, and failed. In China, alchemists tried to make jade – and produced celadon, a greenish-glazed porcelain. It must have seemed magical.
In the ancient world, China was a virtual Silicon Valley, where generations of inventors first created paper, the compass, gunpowder, silk, tea cultivation and porcelain.
It was during the Eastern Han Dynasty, more than 2,000 years ago, that the Chinese developed the first porcelain. This was the light, greenish celadon porcelain – much harder than clay pots, more durable and the first ceramic impervious to water. It could be cleaned!
For the Chinese, jade was the most valued stone, a symbol of virtue, purity, prosperity and eternity. It was associated with the elite, royalty and authority – believed to offer protection in life and the afterlife. Porcelain took on these same attributes.
The Secret Sauce
The secret was the Chinese’s closely guarded recipe of kaolin clay and petuntse, and the development of ovens or kilns that could “cook” these clay vessels at extremely high temperatures of more than 2,000 degrees. Imagine discovering the recipe for baking bread, and also having to invent the oven.
While Europe was in its Dark Ages, several Chinese cities had begun mass producing porcelain. The most fabled of these cities was Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province in eastern China.
“Jingdezhen was established in 1004 by the Song dynasty emperor Jingde as China’s original factory city,” writes journalist Huan Hsu, in his book, The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China.
“Far from the quaint pristine old China of the Western imagination, each area of this bustling artistic and industrial hulk was dedicated to one part of the porcelain-making process – from sourcing clay to packaging finished goods, and everything was done by hand. Entire neighborhoods of craftsmen spent their working lives mixing one glaze, throwing one shape, or applying a single brushstroke.”
This Chinese video gives you an idea of the mastery of the crafts required to make porcelain.
Going Blue
Beginning in the 13th Century, the Mongols conquered China and ruled as the Yuan Dynasty. The Mongols counted as their mythical ancestors the ‘hazy blue’ wolf and the ‘white’ fallow doe. During this time, the Chinese developed kilns that could heat porcelain to even higher temperatures to make whiter porcelain vessels. And they perfected cobalt-colored blue glazes.
Their blue-and-white porcelain far surpassed the greenish celadon porcelain in popularity. By the middle of the 15th Century, Jingdezhen was producing nearly half a million pieces of porcelain a year. There isn’t a reliable accounting but production probably surpassed a million pieces a year at the height of Europe’s madness for porcelain in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Porcelain became so synonymous with China that it became known as china.
Other nations tried to catch up. The Koreans learned to make porcelain not long after the Chinese, but in terms of popularity it was like Samsung versus Chinese-made iPhones. The Japanese learned to make porcelain from the Koreans in the 17th Century. Still the Chinese brand remained more powerful and popular.
Declining Dominance
Europeans didn’t learn to make porcelain until the Germans succeeded in the early 18th Century in Meissen. And the English learned to make a yellowish porcelain called bone china late in the 18th Century, although it wasn’t widely produced until late in the 19th Century.
With the production of European fine china, the tide for Chinese porcelain turned.
At the same time, by the 19th century, China’s Qing dynasty was headed for political and economic collapse. During the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century, the rebels destroyed Jingdezhen’s 9,000 kilns. The kilns were rebuilt, and the Chinese continued to export porcelain – but by then their great monopoly had been broken.
Coming to America
Which brings us to the California Gold Rush of the 1850s, and the subsequent migration of Chinese laborers and merchants to the United States – transnationals who worked in multiple countries. They left China and its turmoil, but most of them weren’t turning their backs on their Chinese culture and porcelains.
Many of these transnational Chinese lived in Chinatowns. By the mid-20th century, most of the smaller Chinatowns had been demolished – and a few had been burned down. In recent years, archaeologists have examined the remains of the Chinatowns.
Historical archaeologist Laura Ng, whose dissertation included an analysis of the cultural deposits from the San Bernardino and Riverside Chinatowns, which existed from roughly 1870 to 1940, and a comparison with artifacts she examined at Gom Benn’s Wo Hing Village for the same period.
My Bowls, Your Bowls
In Gom Benn, the porcelain bowls (like the ones from my father’s house) were scratched with Chinese characters or “pecked marks” to denote ownership, observed Laura.
“Pecked marks were found on 32 vessels in the (Gom Benn) home village, but none were identified on any ceramic sherds in the Inland Empire Chinatowns,” wrote Laura. “Pecked marks on vessels in the home village have a strong association with large feasting meals during festivals; it is possible that the lack of pecked marks in the two Chinatowns is an indication that large communal feasts did not take place.”
San Bernardino and Riverside Chinatowns seemed to have less to celebrate with most women essentially barred from migrating to America.
Also, many of the male Chinese workers in the Chinatowns were classified as partners in merchant businesses to facilitate and legitimize immigration, wrote historian and architect Phillip C. Choy, in his 2014 article: Interpreting “Overseas Chinese” Ceramics Found on Historical Archaeology Sites: Manufacture, Marks, Classification, and Social Use.”
The business housed and fed the partners and/or employees, and provided them with rice bowls – without pecked marks.
Favorite Looks
In Gom Benn, Laura found more of the cheaper blue-on-white patterns: Double Happiness (like one that I have), Bamboo, Peach and Fungus and Chrysanthemum. They look less costly, with hand-painted designs that are more or less scribbles. Laura also describes a “color-glazed ceramic pattern Winter Green and the Four Seasons polychrome overglaze pattern,” which were decorations that looked a little pricier.
Double Happiness was by far the most popular in Gom Benn, but rare in Riverside and non-existent in San Bernardino – where Bamboo was the most popular. Again this follows what Laura concluded, that there was less partying in America. And if there were communal feasts, they were within a business, as Phillip Choy notes.
Double Happiness is a symbol associated with marriage. Bamboo is a symbol of honesty, humility, loyalty – and long life. Peach and fungus are also symbols of longevity and immortality. Chrysanthemums are symbols of longevity, happiness, nobility, and integrity, as well as wealth and prosperity.
The Winter Green design was similar to celadon (light green), while the Four Seasons design featured flowers representing the four seasons: spring (peony), summer (lotus), fall (chrysanthemum), and winter (plum).
Essense of Branding
In a sense, this was a kind of Chinese branding. Long before Nike’s “Just Do It,” Apple’s “Think Different,” DeBeers’ “Diamonds Are Forever,” or Disneyland’s “Happiest Place on Earth,” the Chinese linked symbols and icons with the essence of their culture.
The imagery on the rice bowls tell it all: Celebrate your marriage and your children. Live a virtuous, humble life, a life of honesty and loyalty. For your family, work hard and prosper. May you live a long life, and appreciate all the days, and all the seasons…
My father didn’t leave me books, songs or drawings, but I have these culturally rich porcelain bowls from his ancestral home – a very real treasure.
