Yellow-ground famille rose lacquer cup with scrolling sunflower design

Yellow-ground famille rose lacquer cup with scrolling sunflower design

Repairing porcelain

There's an old Chinese saying that only Chinese people understand these crafts.
The saying goes, "If you don't have the skills, don't take on the job."
This refers to an ancient folk craft called "mending porcelain".

Repairing porcelain is a technique that involves using metal staples, similar to metal mending tools, to fix broken porcelain pieces.

The earliest known example is from the Song Dynasty, in Zhang Zeduan's "Along the River During the Qingming Festival," where a scene of a mender repairing metal is depicted.

When a piece of porcelain breaks, it is useless to keep but a pity to throw away, so craftsmen begin to think about how to repair the broken porcelain.

Through arduous exploration and practice, a reasonable set of porcelain mending techniques was successfully summarized. The unique "metal staples" and "diamond drills" were invented, which led to the emergence of the profession of mending and repairing porcelain.

To properly repair a piece of porcelain requires not only patience in polishing and studying, but also a long period of accumulated experience.

So how has this ancient craft fared in China?

In contemporary society, people's lives have undergone tremendous changes. When porcelain breaks, people simply buy new ones, and no one visits the porcelain mending business anymore.

Without a market, the traditional tool for mending porcelain was almost obsolete. The porcelain mending machine developed in 2013, which could complete the entire process of mending porcelain in less than 18 seconds, became the last straw that broke the camel's back.

Machine operation is indeed faster and more convenient, but it has lost the art of restoration that involves enduring loneliness and mending life back into porcelain.

If these traditional crafts continue to be neglected and unprotected, it may be more than just porcelain that will break and become irreparable in the future…