Christie's Amsterdam : The Nanking Cargo - Chinese Export Porcelain and Gold, European Glass and Stoneware, recovered by Captain Michael Hatcher from a European merchant ship wrecked in the South China Seas. Monday 28 April - Friday 2 May 1986

Christie's Amsterdam auction house has established itself as the most significant venue in the world for the disposal at public auction, of artefacts and cargo recovered from sunken vessels. Earlier 'shipwreck' sales at Christie's Amsterdam have normally included a certain number of ceramic vessels, oriental or western, which were primarily domestic crockery for the crew. Nothing had prepared the international art world for the arrival at Christie's in 1983/4, of an extensive cargo of Chinese porcelain, recovered from a Chinese junk. It had sunk, apparently in the mid 1640's on its way to the massive Dutch entrepot at Batavia, where the V.O.C. maintained the centre for their South Asian Trading and administrative activities under the control of a semi-autonomous council, the Hoge Regering. The cargo became known as the 'Hatcher Shipwreck'; named after Captain Michael Hatcher, the salvage expert who recovered over 23.000 pieces of 'new' Chinese porcelain in the unprecedented salvage operation. The cargo attracted enormous international interests from collectors, dealers and academics.

Fired by the excitement that this sale had generated, Captain Hatcher continued searching for other early cargoes. In late spring of 1985, he began to excavate a second ship. The salvage operation, carried out with considerable care and recorded on film in great detail, recovered a cargo of well over a hundred thousand pieces of Chinese porcelain, supplemented by finds of western metalwork, stonewares and gold.

The ceramics from the Nanking cargo will probably become most famous for the enormous quantities of mid eighteenth century blue and white porcelain found on board, which was destined for western markets. This type of export blue and white porcelain, and most particularly those pieces with elaborate underglaze blue border patterns, has been called 'Nanking' or 'Nankeen' since it began to appear in trade advertisements and auction catalogues in the 1760s. The name "Nanking' helps to distinguish the present cargo from Captain Hatcher's first wreck, which sailed a century earlier with a comparable load of export quality blue and white, but which had none of the association, that this cargo does, with western taste and decoration in the eighteenth century.

For historians, collectors and dealers the Nanking cargo will be every bit as fascinating as the first 'Hatcher one, but for different reasons. Both are sealed time capsules, datable fairly precisely; the first to the 1640's, the second to circa 1750.

Hardcover

Book condition: Very Good. Covers have light general wear plus foxing to front free end papers. Some pages has a minor crease and trifle foxing to top corner to top right corner. Crease to page 75-78. Light dust stain to top edge of page-block. Otherwise internally clean

Dust Jacket condition: No Jacket as issued

Dimensions: 21 x 26 cm

Print length: 272 Pages

Language: English

Publication date: 1986

Publisher: Christie’s Amsterdam B.V.