Tips for Collecting Historical Blue & White China

Series Summary

Have you ever wandered into Grandma’s kitchen and peered into her fine china cabinet, asking yourself why the plates are painted blue and standing upright? You know for sure that if she ever caught you in there, you’d be in big trouble. Well now, it’s time that you learned just what the fuss was about.

Fine china is a porcelain product that not only holds a great deal of value, but also a bit of cultural history as an artifact of the times in which it was made. Since its first appearance during the Han dynasty, the eponymous china was decorated with designs that represented the people using it or the setting in which it was placed. Though today, in a world of fast-paced junk food and disposability, china production, especially of the hand-crafted type, seems to be an anachronism of the age.

Well, fear not, china lovers. In this free video series, learn how to collect and preserve fine and fancy blue china. Our expert will walk you through how to identify pieces by color and pattern, how to get them restored when chipped or cracked, how to properly display china, a discussion of the value of individual pieces and a complete set, whether to eat on your china or not, and more. Watch these videos and learn how to help preserve a part of our cultural heritage. Start collecting today!

Video Transcript

"Today we're here to talk about historical blue. The period that we're going to talk about today is between the 1820s and the 1850s. You can see some of this displayed on the table here. We're going to talk about the places and the events and the series that they did make here in America and in England. Particularly in England and you'll see a lot of English patterns that were imported into this country. It's a highly collectible area, a very expensive area to collect in. It's for the distinguished collector who has a lot of money to invest in these pieces. They get very expensive. So we're going to talk a little bit about the different shapes and the difference between historical blue, which we have here, and what you can see behind me, which is mulberry and is the same period, about 1820's to the 1850s. Very different, very different in color. You can see the blue design - a very distinct blue compared to the mulberry, which is very dark, almost black in color. Then, it can fade almost to a purply hue. So there's a big difference between, even though it was popular at the same time. So that's what we're going to look into today."