10 June 2007 (Viet Nam News) – This story starts off with how Vietnamese ceramics have been found in Japan, and continues to talk about the ceramic tradition of Vietnam from ancient times to now.
Potters keep in touch with prehistoric roots
Archaeologists have discovered 14-century ceramic products of Vietnamese origin in Sakai, a small Japanese town that used to be a busy commercial port in the 15th and 16th centuries. Digs at the Royal Palace in Okinawa have also revealed many Vietnamese ceramic articles.
From the 15th to 17th centuries, Viet Nam and Japan traded earthenware. Vietnamese products appealed to the Japanese sense of humbleness for their simple forms and somewhat coarse finish. The tapered bowls that required both hands to hold were found to be more convenient than the smaller and more delicate Chinese cups.
Ceramic production made its debut in Viet Nam 4,000 years before the Christian era, in the first cultures of the Bronze Age. By the time of the Dong Son culture that marked the peak of the prehistoric civilisation in the basin of the Hong (Red) River in the first millennium before Jesus Christ, the potter’s wheel and the oven had been introduced.
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Read about Vietnamese ceramics tradition.
Related books about Vietnamese ceramics:
– The Ceramics of Southeast Asia : Their Dating and Identification by R. M. Brown
– Vietnamese Ceramics: A Separate Tradition by J. Stevensen, J. Guy and L. A. Cort
