A complete and exquisite piece of porcelain can be displayed and collected, but what use can a broken piece of porcelain do?
The answer from Jingdezhen, the thousand-year-old porcelain capital, is not only useful, but also quite useful!
Recently, the world's first ancient ceramic gene bank was listed in the Jingdezhen Royal Kiln Museum in Jiangxi Province.
The Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum announced that it will cooperate with a number of top domestic universities and institutions to build a gene bank of ancient ceramics based on the nearly 20 million ancient porcelain pieces that have been unearthed.
Through component analysis and data collection of ancient ceramic pieces, genetic specimens in physical and digital forms are made to analyze the origin, development and changes of ancient ceramic civilization, and to awaken the memory of those civilizations that once slept underground.
What genetic code is hidden in a broken piece of porcelain?
When you arrive in Jingdezhen, there is one place you have to go to, which is the Royal Kiln Museum built on the ruins of the Royal Kiln Factory.
Compared with other museums, the biggest highlight here is that most of the artifacts in the museum are repaired by matching damaged porcelain pieces unearthed in the imperial kiln factory.
As we all know, Jingdezhen is a famous historical and cultural city of ceramics, which was born and prospered by porcelain, and is famous for its porcelain. It has a history of more than 2,000 years of pottery smelting, more than 1,000 years of official kiln history, and more than 600 years of imperial kiln history. Rich.
In the ancient core porcelain-making area, the Royal Kiln Factory and its surrounding areas, tens of millions or even billions of broken pieces of porcelain were buried underground, and some kiln slag was piled up to a thickness of more than ten meters.
Since the 1980s, Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum and its predecessor, Jingdezhen Institute of Ceramics and Archaeology, in conjunction with Jiangxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Peking University School of Archaeology and Museology, the Palace Museum and other units, have successfully conducted 30 surveys of ancient kiln sites in different dynasties. More than 100 tons of ancient kiln specimens have been unearthed in more than one archaeological excavations, and nearly 20 million pieces of broken porcelain have been collected, of which the Ming and Qing imperial kilns accounted for a large proportion.
Why are there so many pieces of imperial kiln porcelain?
Jiang Jianxin, the honorary institute of Jingdezhen Ceramics and Archaeology Institute, introduced that the firing of fine imperial kiln porcelain requires numerous experiments, and the complicated process of firing porcelain has resulted in a very low rate of high-quality products.
Even if it is not a test product or a defective product, in order to prevent the palace porcelain from flowing into the people, the extra fine products will be smashed and buried on the spot.
It is these "losers" and "superfluous ones" buried deep in the ground that today provide us with the interpretation of the genetic code of ancient ceramics firing process, raw material formula and so on.
"The massive ancient ceramic fragments in Jingdezhen have a complete chronological sequence and rich archaeological information, and the relevant data contained are extremely authoritative, and their value is not inferior to or even higher than the handed down collections of the same period." Weng Yanjun, director of Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum, said.
In his opinion, the complete ancient ceramic wares of the imperial kiln are very precious, and the handed down collections have extremely high aesthetic value, but from the perspective of research, they are too limited, because it is impossible to break a complete ware for research. .
In contrast, ancient ceramic fragments are more conducive to technical detection, and can meet the requirements of modern instruments and equipment such as energy dispersive electron microscopy, Raman spectrometers, and X-ray fluorescence analyzers for detection objects.
In the hands of researchers, a piece of ancient porcelain can be used to observe the surface decoration, splicing the reducer type, slice to understand the green tire, grind the powder to analyze the material and even the firing temperature, etc. At least hundreds of pieces of information can be parsed.
For example, for the pigments used in blue and white porcelain, many domestic academic circles believe that the blue and white pigment Su Ma Liqing from Persia was used in the production of early blue and white porcelain, because blue and white painted pottery was produced there; Crown's Yongle and Xuande blue-and-white porcelains used both imported and domestic pigments.
However, most of these are speculated by people through the Qing Dynasty literature and handed down craftsmanship, and there is no research support.
After technological progress, people began to infer the composition of blue and white pigments through the iron-manganese ratio, but the accuracy is still questionable.
"Now, the ancient ceramic gene bank has carried out physicochemical analysis of blue and white porcelain fragments through advanced focused ion beam microscopy, and confirmed that both domestic and imported pigments were used." Weng Yanjun said.
In the future, scientific research results like this will continue to emerge, which is expected to restore the firing process and raw material formula of ancient ceramic specimens at that time, explore the mystery of Jingdezhen's millennium ceramic craftsmanship, and decipher the civilization code hidden in the peak era of ancient human porcelain industry.
What can an ancient ceramic gene bank do?
Over the years, with its unique ceramic archaeological and cultural preservation resources and sound supporting facilities, Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum has successively cooperated with Peking University, the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Palace Museum, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Tokyo and many other domestic and foreign institutions. Carry out academic exchanges and archaeological cooperation, and on this basis have accumulated nearly 20,000 ceramic analysis data from more than ten kilns, and initially established a basic scientific database of ancient ceramics in my country.
Since July last year, Jingdezhen Royal Kiln Museum has started to build the Jingdezhen Ancient Ceramics Gene Bank, and the top domestic universities and research institutions that have cooperated with it for a long time have also joined the collection and research work of the gene bank.
After nearly a year of hard work, the Jingdezhen Ancient Ceramics Gene Bank was officially unveiled, marking the official start of the construction of a gene bank of Chinese ceramic civilization cultural relics that integrates data storage, archaeological research, scientific and technological analysis, protection and restoration, and achievement display.
"Jingdezhen Ancient Ceramics Gene Bank refers to the typical specimens of all kinds of porcelain produced in Jingdezhen in ancient times and the sum of their information. We plan to complete the first batch of nearly 10,000 specimens from the Ming Dynasty imperial kiln period in one and a half years, and then use 3 In five years, the gene storage of archaeological specimens unearthed in Jingdezhen over the years will be completed," said Weng Yanjun.
According to Xiong Zhe, head of the Science and Technology Laboratory of Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum, the gene bank mainly collects specimens in four forms: fragments, cross-sections, thin slices, and powders. Through these types of specimens, some kilns found somewhere can be analyzed. Information on archaeology, tire material, molding, glaze, firing, and color painting of some ceramics unearthed or unearthed.
For example, in 2012, during the archaeological excavation of Lantian kiln in Fuliang County, Jingdezhen, a celadon bowl from the late Tang Dynasty was discovered, and there were burn marks on the inside of the bowl.
Peg stacking is to use kaolin clay to form "spikes", stick these nails to the edge of the ring foot of the bowl, and then place the bowl blank on the cushion column, and then overlap the bowl blank with the support nails, representing the The earliest porcelain-making process in this area.
Today, it has a number in the gene bank. The leading T stands for "Tang Dynasty", followed by QY for "green glaze", WA for "bowl", C for "fragment", and numbers for serial numbers.
By analogy, the specimens in the gene bank will be coded according to age, category, organ type and morphological information.
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the largest collection of imperial kiln porcelain specimens.
The genetic specimens unearthed from the imperial kilns will also be given a special number "Y", which stands for "Royal Kiln".
The latest collection of specimens comes from the archaeological exploration of the west wall of the imperial kiln factory in 2020. In the serial number, "QH" is used to represent blue and white, and "SZ" is used to represent "trial photo", indicating that it is a test piece of blue and white materials tested in a folk kiln. According to the specimen, the words "light" and "dense" are written with different shades of cobalt, revealing the "code" of blue and white as the main products of folk kilns from the Ming Dynasty to the Tianshun period.
"The Jingdezhen Ancient Ceramics Gene Bank will achieve open sharing in the collection and use of specimen data," said Weng Yanjun.
These specimen information can not only be used for display, cultural relics protection and refined models of 3D printing, but also provide scientific and technical support for the development of contemporary ceramic cultural and creative products and the construction of digital museums.
According to unofficial records, Ming Xuanzong Zhu Zhanji loved fighting crickets, and the court records did not mention this matter.
However, the Jingdezhen Royal Kiln Museum restored the blue-and-white cloud-dragon-patterned cricket jar of Xuande year among the many broken pieces, which has become a powerful material evidence of this history.
Such vivid historical details can be used in the development and application of cultural and creative products and tourism products in the future.
It is also a blue-and-white cloud-dragon pattern cricket jar of Xuande in Ming Dynasty. Through the knowledge graph database under development, users can easily retrieve all porcelains containing cloud-dragon patterns in the gene bank, which are related to the related cricket jars in Suzhou Museum and Toguri Art Museum in Japan. Collection, and further extended to information about blue and white porcelain songs, Meizhou and Zhangzhou porcelain production areas.
This will greatly promote the construction of digital museums.
More importantly, the technical system of the Jingdezhen imperial kiln site has profoundly affected the development of the world's porcelain-making industrialization.
The great success of blue-and-white porcelain in overseas markets has made kilns around the world, including China, rush to imitate and recreate it as a model.
Today, Turkey, Egypt, Japan, Vietnam, North Korea, Italy, France, the Netherlands and other countries still retain important physical remains of these early kilns.
"After the completion of the Jingdezhen Ancient Ceramics Gene Bank, it will actively cooperate with domestic and foreign academic institutions to promote the global sharing of ancient ceramics research data, discuss the global ceramic civilization topics, and contribute to the excavation and research of ancient ceramics history in China and the world, and the development of ceramic culture. It provides an excellent platform for communication and exchanges, and continues to write a new story of civilization fusion with ceramics as the carrier." Weng Yanjun said.
Zheng Na