[ART] Vietnamese ceramics in South East Asia

[hduc@airmoon.epa.nsw.gov.au]

Hello all,

The recent news and discussion in this list (vnsa-l) about the revival of 
the art of ceramics in Bat Trang is interesting. I have a relative coming 
from the village of Bat Trang (off Chuong Duong Bridge in Hanoi). He told
me a few years ago that the market economy did some wonders : the revival 
of the lost art and now many people from this area now practise the ancient 
skill that thought to be lost. A recent book by Prof. Phan Huy Le on Vietnamese 
ceramics is also very timely.

This also reminds me of an exhibition of a large collection of Vietnamese 
ceramics in Singapore in 1982. I saw this collection by chance in the 
Singapore National Museum that year when i visited the island. I was also 
surprised to know that another vast collection of ancient Vietnamese
ceramics is in the Jakarta National Museum. The ceramics dated back to 
the 15th century and is a prized collection. 

>From my little research and reading, i found out that most of these ceramics 
were excavated in East Java, Sulewesi and the Philippines. These ceramics 
came from private diggings in Indonesia in the late 60s and then flooded the 
Singapore antique markets by eager merchants in a very short period after 
the 'Confrontasi' period which made Indonesia economy go asunder. (See the
extract at the end)

Excavations in Truwulan, East Java, considered to be the centre of the 
Majapahit kingdom have yielded many unusual finds of unusual Vietnamese 
ceramics shards. The Majapahit empire was at the summit of its greatness 
under King hayam Wuruk, when trade relations with China and neighbouring 
countries flourished. Close ties might have existed with the Kingdom of 
Champa as a Champa princess, Gayatri, was named in old inscriptions as the 
favourite queen of Raden Wijaya, the first king of Majapahit (1239-1309), and 
earlier inscriptions of the tenth century have mentioned Cham traders 
settling down in Java. (Reference : Sumarah Adhyatman, Vietnamese 
ceramics in Jakarta, Arts of Asia, March 1984, pp 52-62).

Extensive ceramics trade with Vietnam peaked in the later end of the 15th 
century to replace the ending of China trade to South East Asia when the 
Ming Dynasty prohibited Chinese merchants to undertake sea voyages beyond 
the 'Middle Kingdom'.

An extract of a paper by William Willets on the 'un-official' history of 
the discovery of Vietnamese ceramics as items of collection in South East 
Asia in the last decades is included here as an interesting footnote. 

(Most Vietnamese ceramics in those mentioned collection were from Bat 
Trang in the Red River Delta and Go Sanh, near Qui Nhon, in Central 
Vietnam)

Enjoy.

Cheers,

Hiep Nguyen

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Vietnamese ceramics
William Willets, Orientations, May 1982, pp 37-43

........

Postscript:

Twenty years ago nobody knew very much about Vietnamese ceramics. Only 
after the end of the so-called 'confrontation' between Indonesia and 
Malaysia, to be exact in 1967, did the revelation begin. The heavens 
opened, and a deluge of pots descended, mainly upon the island republic 
of Singapore. The rainmakers were the tukang antik, itenerant Indonesian 
dealers who crowded into the small hotels of Singapore, their wicker 
baskets crammed with pottery, much of which was of types unknown in the 
records of ceramic history, and which in some cases, had been lost to 
human view for many hundred of years, having interred with the dead in 
burial grounds on island all over the Indonesian archipelago. The pots 
came from China, Thailand and Vietnam, in that order of frequency.

The pots lined the shelves of almirahs in the hotel rooms, stood shoulder 
to shoulder on marble-toped washed-stands, on chairs and on tables, on 
and under beds, and all over the floor. Word spread, and soon the buyers 
gathered, hopping from one dealer to the next, the air filling with the 
clamour of bargaining, a good deal of  'I saw it first' argumentation, 
and amounting emotion at the realisation that a new chapter of ceramic 
history was being unfolded.

Nobody knew very much. Prices were extremely low - a fifteen-century 
Sawankaloke covered box for S$20, a Ming blue-and-white bowl for $S20, a 
Vietnamese blue-and-white offering dish for S$150. In this context, the 
offering dish was bought for the University of Singapore in 1969 for an 
exceptionally large sum. But then, it is an exceptional piece, almost 
identical to one in the famous collection assembled by the Safavid rulers 
of Persia once kept in the Ardebil Shrine and now in the Iran Bastan 
museum, Theran, which is illustrated by John Pope in his "Chinese 
porcelains from the Ardebil Shrine". This collection consists mainly of 
Chinese blue-and-white dishes of exemplary quality but included a few 
'strays' such as the Vietnamese pieces.

Those few years were exciting ones to have lived through. I must repeat, 
our knowledge was abysmal. One of the few reference works then available 
was Van Orsay de Fline's Gids voor keramishe Verzamelling (Uitheemse 
Keramiek), a guide to the collection in the National Museum, Jakarta, 
first published in 1949. The University of Singapore's collection was 
built up, quite literally, by our showing dealers illustrations in this 
book of the types we wanted and asking them to bring us similar pieces on 
their next visit. And they did.

There were vast areas of confusion in people's minds. For example, we 
were not confident that we could always distinguish a Vietnamese piece 
from a Thai one from the Sukhothai factory. We were often misled by the 
illustrations in Okuda Seiichi's "Annam Toji Zukan (Annamese ceramics)", 
published in 1954, in which half of the illustrated specimens identified 
by him as Annamese are in fact from south China. We were also worried 
about dates. Could such a pot really be as much as four hundred years old 
?. It looked so new.

Well, we were new too; and we made mistakes. And when a few superb 'Ming' 
Chinese blue-and-whites appeared innoculously on the same market we were 
tempted and fell, and paid the price of our ignorance.

Probably most of the examples of Vietnamese ceramics on exhibition in 
Singapore were purchased during those years in Singapore. Certainly, most 
of them came from Indonesia. Some, as we learn from the catalogue of the 
exhibition, were acquired in Hanoi or Saigon, and a few, doubtless, from 
the Philippines. The cloud-burst of pots from Indonesia was caused by a 
combination of factors : the particular demand in Indonesia for modern 
consumer goods following a long period of deprivation of such goods, 
which Singapore had to offer in abundance; the discovery, made by a few 
fortunate Indonesians, that they were sitting on a nest-egg of dollars 
with which to buy these goods; and the prevailing political detente.

Four, five, six hundreds years ago the ancestors of these Indonesians had 
bartered their own produce - the pearls, the ivory, spices, unguents, 
exotic foodstuffs - for pots from China, Thailand and Vietnam, pots made 
glamorous by the unfamiliarity of their form and substance, their 
intimation of a higher order of culture, at least of a more advanced 
technology. Now, they themselves exchanging these same pots for 
tape-recorders, cameras, watches, calculators, artefacts of an even more 
advanced technology, and there seems to be no end of the supply of both 
kinds of good.

In the past fifteen years, Vietnamese pottery has won a safe and 
permanent place in the public museums where ceramics are displayed, and 
in affections of many private collectors. The current Singapore 
exhibition seems an appropriate moment to recall those years in the late 
1960s when some of us were fortunate enough to have witnessed a chapter 
of  'unofficial' history of Vietnamese ceramics.
 
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