Chinese porcelain in Old Mobile

Magazine Antiques, July, 1996 by Linda Rosenfeld Shulsky

Old Mobile's population of about three hundred consisted of French immigrants, French Canadians, French Creoles from Haiti, American Indians, and both African and American Indian slaves. Most of the male settlers kept American Indian women as housekeepers and companions, but young women from France were also sent out to be married to colonists.

The settlement of approximately one hundred structures was laid out in a grid pattern with Fort Louis at the center, overlooking the river. Within the fort were the church, the residences of the colonial officials, and the royal warehouses. The houses [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. IV AND FIGURE 1 OMITTED] were built of timber in a style derived from the Creole cottage, which had developed in northern Haiti from French and African antecedents. The spaces between the timbers were filled with bousillage, a mixture of clay and Spanish moss. Some houses were built on pilings eighteen to twenty-four inches above ground to protect them from flooding. Nonetheless, the spring rains of 1711 flooded nearly two-thirds of the houses in Old Mobile and the settlement was abandoned.

The 1989 excavations were begun under the direction of Gregory Waselkov of the University of South Alabama in Mobile. Some three thousand shards of Asian porcelain and European-style ceramics have since been found.(2) Because Old Mobile was occupied for less than a decade and because the site remained undisturbed, the finds have great significance for the dating of Chinese porcelain. The shards I have studied from the excavation are of excellent quality, thin in body, and carefully painted. Almost all are typical of wares made at Jingdezhen, China, during the reign of the emperor Kangxi (r.1662-1722). Until the Meissen factory near Dresden, Germany, began to make true hard-paste porcelain in the early eighteenth century, China and Japan were the only sources.

Some porcelain has been found at other French colonial sites, but not in the quantities found at Old Mobile.(3) Since the settlers there traded with the nearby Spanish settlement of Pensacola (in what is now Florida) and with the Spanish colonial ports of Havana, Cuba, and Veracruz (in what is now Mexico), it seems likely that the porcelain found at Old Mobile came through trade with the Spanish rather than through the Compagnie des Indes, which was founded at the end of the seventeenth century to facilitate trade between France and China.(4) The discovery in Old Mobile of twelve Spanish colonial silver coins of a type minted in Mexico City attests to the trading relationship with the Spanish.(5) Relations between France and Spain were amicable at the time because both were anxious to limit English expansion in the New World, and although Mobile Bay was first located by the Spanish explorer Tristan de Luna y Arellano (1510-1573) in 1559, the French established Old Mobile with the blessing of the Spanish.(6)

The Spanish colonies acquired their Chinese porcelain via Manila, for Ferdinand Magellan (c.1480-1521) had explored the Philippines in the early sixteenth century and claimed them for Spain. The Philippines had been a market for Chinese ceramics since the Tang dynasty (618-906), and Spanish traders quickly seized the opportunity to exchange Chinese porcelain for Mexican silver, which was much in demand in China. Large shipments of Chinese porcelain did not begin to reach the Mexican port of Acapulco until 1573.(7) Buyers came from all over New Spain to buy porcelain at an annual fair held in Acapulco in January. Porcelain was then taken by mule to Veracruz and from there shipped to the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and to Spain.

In comparing shards found at Old Mobile to complete objects I tried to match the colors, the style of painting, and the decorative motifs. It was not always possible to match shapes. The partial dish shown in Plates V and Va is decorated with two energetic dragons that are outlined with tiny dots in a style similar to that on a vase of the so-called dragoon type(8) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The symbol on the back of the dish - a four-footed rectangular vessel (fang ding) enclosed within the double blue circle - is typical of objects made during the reign of Kangxi. The fragments with part of a foot ring shown in Plate VI resemble in their painting the cup shown in Plate VII. The presence of this type of decoration on earthenware objects made in Puebla, Mexico, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries(9) suggests that white on blue decoration must have been brought into the Spanish colonies via Manila.

The beautifully painted flower decorating the shards shown in Plate VIII resembles the flower on the pot in Plate X. The scrolling foliate designs in Plate III are similar to the decoration on the vase shown in Plate I. The same foliate decoration appears on a vase in a German princely collection that was assembled in the eighteenth century.(10)

The shards in Plate XIV are decorated like the bowl in Plate XV and objects in what is known as the Vung Tau cargo, the contents of a trading ship wrecked off the southern coast of Vietnam about 1690.(11) The ship was probably bound from southern China to Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), the Asian administrative center of the Dutch East India Company.