It seems our planet is always turning up some new and fascinating species which, over thousands of years has lain buried deep in the bowels of the earth, so is it possible that archaeologists in China have discovered a new human species?

Until lately, due to the lack of strong textual evidence and reliable reign-marked pieces created in the period of 1436 to 1464, it had been presumed by Western porcelain authorities, different than the views of Chinese scholars, that Jingdezhen potters carried on to create imperial-quality blue-and-white porcelain, which were given the nianhao of the former Xuande reign. Chinese specialists have long accepted the view that because it was absolutely forbidden to use a given nianhao after the death of the emperor to whose rule it implemented that it wasn’t in fact done.

From the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), the underglaze-blue ornamentation of porcelains had already achieved a level of maturity at Jingdezhen, in spite of blue-and-white not actually preferred as the prescribed court taste. During that time, the favored objects of the court and the literati-aristocracy were the monochromatic white family of qingbai and shufu wares which reigned in production. These two products and the blue-and-white ware called qinghua are all stylistically interconnected.