porcelain,china.
Second only to tea, perhaps the most important contribution China made to European life was "china" itself ?the hard translucent glazed pottery the Chinese had invented under the Tang dynasty and which we also know as porcelain. China had long since exported porcelain over the Silk Route to Persia and Turkey and fine examples of pre-1500 china are still in everyday use there. (An English diplomat collected almost five tons (!) of Ming pieces while serving in Iran in 1875.) In Europe before the dawn of the China trade, the highest achievement of the potter's art was a kind of earthenware which was fired, then coated with an opaque glaze and fired again, fixing the colors with which it had been painted. This was generally named for its supposed place of origin and was known as majolica in Italy, faience in France, Delft in the Low Countries, and so forth. No earthenware could stand up to boiling water without dissolving and nowhere in Europe was it understood how to heat a kiln to the fourteen hundred degrees or so required to vitrify clay and make it impervious to liquids, boiling or not. Even so wise a man as Sir Francis Bacon could only view porcelain as a kind of plaster which, after a long lapse of time buried in the earth, "congealed and glazed itself into that fine substance." Other writers speculated it was made from lobster shell or eggs pounded into dust.