item details
Overview
Craze for the Orient
By the early 1700s, exciting new items were arriving in Europe through trade with China, Japan, and India. Porcelain, lacquer, silks, and Eastern styles were new to European eyes – and local manufacturers were swift to imitate them.
The resulting style, chinoiserie, was highly decorative and whimsical, evoking exotic, faraway lands.
Salvaged cargo
This Chinese porcelain is from the shipwreck of the Geldermalsen, a Dutch East India Company vessel which sank off an island in Indonesia in 1752. The ship was carrying trade goods including more than 680,000 pounds of tea, gold, silk, and vast quantities of Chinese porcelain.
In 1985, salvager Michael Hatcher and his partner Max de Rham set out to find the Geldermalsen, using satellite navigation, proton magnetometers and side-scan sonar to locate the wreck. Over 150,000 porcelain pieces were salvaged from the ship and auctioned off by Christies Amsterdam in 1986, fetching more than £10 million. Christies called the collection the ‘Nanking Cargo’.
Hatcher has been strongly criticised for prioritising his commercial interests over the heritage value of the wreck, prioritising the removal of the ceramics over an archaeological investigation of the site. The Geldermalsen was destroyed during the salvage.
See:
- Brouwers, Will. 2024. ‘Geldermalsen (+1752)’. Stepping Stones of Maritime History.
- Jörg, C.J.A. 1986. The Geldermalsen: History and Porcelain. Groningen: Kemper Publishers.
- Wang, Audrey. 2020. ‘The Geldermalsen: Shipwrecks, Treasure-Hunters & The Nanking Cargo’. AGGV Magazine, December 2020.
- ---, n.d. ‘Vessel’. 2012,3046.22. British Museum catalogue record.