In the latest update from MAAST, one of our participants, Han, gives an insight into the personal connection he has with Chinese porcelain and shares the questions that sorting and studying the amazing amount of Chinese porcelain discovered at America Square has raised.

As an amateur archaeologist and collector of Chinese porcelain, I am fascinated by the journey that led an item to the palm of my hand. An item whose owner and maker, as well as the very social and economic world in which it was created have long since departed. Yet, it is these discarded relics that offer the purest insight to a world long gone and allow us to access the lives of the users in the present day. Nothing can tell a more elaborate story of East-West relations than the development of trade. For how can a Chinese vase made in a small fishing town in the Qing dynasty, Fujian, end up on the table top of a Georgian English solicitor in London? This is but one question that puzzled me when Jacqui first arranged the hundreds of sherds of broken Chinese “China” for us to see.