Peony Porcelain of Luoyang

This is the youngest craft on this site. It began in 2009.

A Craft That Began in 2009

The technique took nearly three years to work out, across more than two thousand trials. The problem it was solving is easy to state and hard to do: to build a peony bloom out of porcelain at full size, petal by petal, and have the whole assembly come out of the kiln as one piece.

The flower is not painted on, and it is not a separate piece added later. Each petal is modelled by hand in clay and joined to the vessel while it is still soft. The bloom and the vessel are then fired together.

That is the whole idea. A painted peony can be added to any vessel; a peony built in the round has to be designed with the vessel from the start.

Built on an Older Technique

New as it is, peony porcelain does not stand on nothing. It rests on an older technique — the firing of white porcelain, listed in Luoyang's municipal heritage register as the Tang white porcelain craft.

The two are not in competition. The older craft supplies the material and the kiln knowledge; the newer one supplies a form the older craft was never asked to make. White porcelain is a surface and a body. A peony built petal by petal is a structure, and it has to be fired as one.

Why Peonies, Why Luoyang

The peony is Luoyang's city flower, a status the city gave it in 1982. The association itself is far older than that.

The standard summary of it is an official one: the peony began here in the Sui, flourished in the Tang, and was held to be the finest under heaven by the Song. That last part is not a modern slogan. Ouyang Xiu, writing in the Northern Song, recorded that the peonies which came from Luoyang were "today the first under heaven."

The city has kept the flower in view ever since. Its peony festival began in 1983, and the flower appears in the decorative vocabulary of the crafts practised here.

New Is Not a Weakness

Every other craft on this site is measured against something older. A replica bronze is judged by how closely it matches an excavated original; a piece of sancai is judged against the Tang pieces it descends from. Peony porcelain has no original to match. It is judged by whether the flower reads as a flower.

That is a different standard, and it is not a lower one.

It would be easy to treat 2009 as a caveat — to write about peony porcelain as something that will be traditional one day. That reads the city backwards.

A place with more than 1,500 years of capital history is not a museum. The crafts practised here were never static. They changed with the taste and the technology of each period, and the ones that survive are the ones that kept being made. A craft that began in 2009 is not an exception to that history. It is the same history, still running.

Where It Stands in the Heritage System

Peony porcelain has no entry of its own in China's intangible cultural heritage lists. A search of the national register returns nothing under that name.

What it rests on is a technique that is recognised: the Tang white porcelain craft, carried at the municipal level in Luoyang. That is the honest position — a new craft, standing on an older technique the heritage system does list.

From Luoyang, With Peonies

This city has been associated with the peony for well over a thousand years. Peony porcelain dates from 2009.

Both are true at once, and there is no contradiction in it. A city stays old by keeping on making things.

The forms and the range of sizes are on our peony porcelain page.