History of Flow Blue China

Series Summary

Have you ever been nosing about at Grandma’s house and happened to find yourself standing in front of her fine china cabinet, asking yourself why the plates are painted blue and standing upright? Your conscience warns you that if she ever caught you in there, you’d be in a heap o’ trouble. Well, it’s high time you learned what the all fuss is about.

Fine china is a valuable (think money) porcelain product that holds a great deal of cultural significance as an artifact of the times in which it was made. Since its first appearance during the Han dynasty, the eponymous china was painted with designs to represent the people using it or the setting in which it was placed. Though today, in a world of fast-paced junk food and disposable plastic dinnerware, china production, especially of the hand-crafted type, seems to be an anachronism of a forgotten age.

Well, fear not, china lovers. In this free video series, learn how to collect and preserve fine flow 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

"So today we're here to talk about Flow Blue. Flow Blue was produced in the Staffordshire potters in the early eighteen hundreds, around the eighteen-twenties up to the eighteen-sixties. It was very popular and then again in the eighteen-eighties up to the early nineteen hundreds. So this was produced and you can see there is a varying in color and in range from a very flow blue to a very clean easy pattern to read. So there is a range in your time frames from the early eighteen twenties up to the turn of the century. When collecting Flow Blue, when you look at the flowing on the plate you can see the running of the Flow Blue and it's produced by the chemical vapor that's introduced into the kiln that causes that flow of the blue. It's on an iron stone base which you will see that most of the Flow Blue has a heavy iron stone base. When you pick it up, you can tell the very base of the Flow Blue is iron stone."