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- However, from about 1530 through to about 1570, few export blue and white pieces seem to have left China and, again, at the end of the Ming dynasty and early Qing for the periods 1645-1660 and 1677-1683, the export trade virtually collapsed with the troubles associated with the change of dynasty from Ming to Qing. However, it is worth noting that the blue and white ceramic export trade by 1570 was looking towards Europe and Indonesia as its market and the quantity of blue and white going to the Philippines after 1570 was small compared with the huge quantities exported to that market early in the 16th century. One of the interesting things about the major Philippine collections, many of which I have seen, is that the blue and white export pieces found in the Philippines can be dated to several relatively short periods when the export trade to the Philippines appears to have flourished only to find in the next period the export trade in these wares had dwindled to almost nothing.
The decoration on non-imperial blue and white went through quite a revolutionary change in about 1500. The continuous lotus scroll decoration probably the commonest decoration, which starts in the first half of the 15th century, becomes by the reign of Zhengde and probably a few years before this an interrupted lotus scroll decoration where the scrolling lotus weaves in and out of the borders between which the scroll is confined. The earliest example of this I have seen was on a Hongzhi (1488-1505) marked piece, the mark being written in the style of Zhengde (1506-1521), the following reign indicative of a dating late in Hongzhi�s reign.
Most of the 16th century blue and white imperial pieces tend to be repetitions of previous designs made, such as dragons and phoenixes. However, some new designs, such as boys playing in a garden and Daoist motifs, such as Shou characters, storks amid clouds, and the like, became popular.
Also, the cluttered designs of the early 16th century , such as dragons amid lotus scrolls, seem to have become unpopular by the mid-16th century. However, in the late Jiajing period, the quantity of blue and white porcelain for imperial use started to decline and, to make good the slack in production, articles started to be produced for the scholar intel�ligentsia of the time. These products moved away from the rather dull imperial type designs and used such scenes as deer in a landscape under a pine tree by a waterfall, and land and seascape with junks and pagodas. These non-imperial designs proved popular with foreign buyers to whom the dragon and phoenix designs on the imperial wares meant little and provided the stimulus for the development of decoration on blue and white pieces for the next 150 years. These non-imperial blue and white pieces of the late Ming, 1560 to 1630, are generally called �kraak� porcelain and are the most interesting of the later Ming blue and white. The basic designs on such pieces changed almost from year to year but the overall composition of the design and, in particular, the subsidiary designs on the backs and borders, frequently stayed the same for decades. This was due to the mass production techniques at the Chinese kilns where the repetitive work of the subsidiary decoration, such as the backs and borders, was done by the less experienced ceramic painters with the frequently changing main decoration being done by the more experienced workers. The term �kraak� for these porcelains was given by the Dutch traders, who became the main traders in Chinese ceramics to Europe from about 1600 onwards. During the 16th century, the Portuguese had been the main carriers of the ceramic export trade from their settle�ments at Malacca and Macau to Europe, but their dominance of that trade was challenged by the Dutch from about 1580 on and seems to have been entirely superseded by the Dutch from about 1600. After 1620, the kraak wares seem gradually to have been replaced in this ceramic export trade with the finer Transitional wares which were still being carried to Europe by the Dutch. The records of the Dutch East India Company, which have been the subject of considerable research, show that the number of Chinese ceramics carried to Europe and Indonesia from 1600 to the 1640�s ran into the hundreds of thousands of pieces and recent marine archaeological discoveries such as the Witte Leeuw and the Hatcher
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