Japanese Porcelain Export to Vietnam and South-East Asia in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Japanese Hizen porcelain which was mainly produced in Arita, consituted one of the major export products from Japan to such destinations as Europe, Middle East, and South-East Asia. As for the South-East Asian market, Hizen porcelain was exported through the two major channels: the official trade of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the junk trade managed by the Chinese overseas trading to Nagasaki.

Out of these two trading routes, the VOC trade offers today researchers with good source materials since most of the Company's records are still well preserved at various archives throughout the world. Thanks to this well-preserved collection, in the past century, there have been a good number of publications relating to the VOC porcelain trade.

Despite their great contributions to our understanding of Japanese porcelain exported to the international market during these two centuries, there still remained incomplete data and even sometimes incorrect figures relating the quantity of Japanese porcelain exported to South-East Asia and so forth. On the basis of the information extracted from the VOC archives, this paper seeks to highlight the major features of the Japanese porcelain exported to Dai Viet (including Dang Ngoai and Dang Trong) in the context of regional and international porcelain trade. It begins with a recapitulation of the Dutch and Chinese trade in Japanese porcelain with Japan, and then moves towards the quantitative analysis of the Hizen wares exported to Dai Viet in the seventeenth century.