Archaeological evidence indicates that the kilns near Dehua in Fujian Province on China’s southeastern coast opened in the late thirteenth century and flourished from the sixteenth to the eighteenth. Characterized by thick, lustrous glazes, Dehua wares, both religious figures and items for use on a scholar’s desk, were exported to Europe in the seventeenth to nineteenth century. They are often known in Western writings by the French term blanc de chine, or “China white,” which originated in nineteenth-century scholarship.
