Then & Now | A potted history of the Chinese porcelain industry, when personalised plates were plentiful

Thirty years ago, organised shopping trips to factory outlets in Kwai Chung, Tsuen Wan and Kowloon City were popular among newcomers to Hong Kong. Along with hotel-quality towels and bedsheets, handmade lampshades and mass-produced rosewood furniture, customised porcelain dinner services could be ordered. Everything from fish plates and demitasse coffee cups, to soup tureens and pudding bowls could be tailored to almost any conceivable pattern.

The new owner’s name, initials and other personalisations were often prominently incorporated into the design. “Ah, so you’ve been shopping at Such-And-Such, too …” I mentally noted at yet another uniformly individual Peak, Pok Fu Lam or Repulse Bay dinner table in the late 1980s. Now largely vanished, this trade was a local extension of a Chinese export porcelain industry that had existed for several centuries.

From the earliest days of the Canton export trade, porcelain was a major luxury export from China to the West. The standard varied greatly, from museum-quality artefacts to ordinary blue-and-white dishes, cups and plates, popularly known as “Kitchen Ming”. Foreigners resident in Canton or Macau often ordered a personalised dinner set as a souvenir of their sojourn in China. Designs and quality could be tailored to suit a client’s taste and budget.

One popular export design was the willow pattern, a blue-and-white motif that featured humpbacked bridges, willow trees and stylised Chinese figures in flowing robes and conical hats, and was widely copied by 17th-century Dutch merchants. Subsequently produced in the Netherlands, it became known as Delftware, the name taken from the city there where it was made. Export-oriented versions were later copied from Dutch exemplars, and mass-produced in Japan from the mid-19th century.