Jiangle ceramics

陜西 晏江梅

Until December, Yu Xueyun, a collector of antique porcelain pieces in Sanming, Fujian Province, donated more than 1,500 selected items to public museums in the hope that the art can be better protected.

In the past 30 years, Yu, 50, spent about 30 million yuan ($4.6 million) in porcelain ware（陶瓷制品）, all of which belong to the Jiangle type of ceramics, named after its producing place, Jiangle county in Sanming city.Yu made the donations because he wanted to hand down the Jiangle porcelain culture and the government has more resources to promote it.Jiangle porcelain ware originated more than 3,000 years ago because the place had abundant rich soil.“Such cultural relics are a crystallization（結晶） of ancient wisdom.They should not be just personal decorations behind closed doors,” Yu said.

He began to collect the old items as a boy but later put all his income and savings into protecting and researching them.Yu recalled that he first had the idea of collecting porcelain pieces at the age of 12 when he happened to find a small dish with two butterflies painted on it near a construction site on his way home from school.“I picked it up just because it was lifelike but never thought it was identified by some expert in our village as a porcelain ware dating back to the Qing Dynasty (1644—1911),” Yu said.

From then on, he began to pay more attention to old porcelain in the soil around his village in Jiangle county.“At that time, people treated antiques as something of a taboo （忌諱）because ancient people who died had used them.Therefore, few people cared about the porcelain and wouldn't collect such items,” he added.After years of collecting, Yu gradually realized that porcelain produced in Jiangle was both unique and delicate.

Since then, he would keep just Jiangle porcelain and use the money from selling other antiques to collect more such ware produced in his hometown.In 2010, Yu removed a wall between a room that he had rented from his neighbor and combined it with his own room and renovated the space into a 150-square-meter family museum that opened to the public for free.

Since 1990, he has donated his classic Jiangle porcelain collection to the county and Sanming city museums.

“My family opposed my donation drive because the porcelain cost us lots of money.But I thought such artistic pieces handed down from our ancestors should be shared with others.Besides, the government can better promote the Jiangle porcelain culture,” Yu said.

Now, Yu displays all his remaining antiques in the museum, which has become a first specifically for Jiangle porcelain.“I haven't decided where to find a job but it would be related to Jiangle porcelain.It is such a rare culture that it should travel beyond the province to the rest of the country and the world.”