Diana Shipwreck Porcelain Cargo c1816 Flying Geese Bowl and Dish


Hand painted with a fenced pavilion beside willow tree in a lakescape. A sampan and pagoda can be seen on a small island, the interior rims with a hatched border.

Size: Bowl H 5cm  Di 10.8cm  Dish: 15.5cm in diameter

Condition: Hairline to the rim of the bowl and the saucer as photographed. Chip to the saucer rim. 

Provenance: This bowl and saucer retains their original Christies auction stickers enabling them to be checked against the sale catalogue. Scanned pages taken from the Christies sale catalogue relating to this bowl and saucer with be supplied with the sale. 


The Ship
Diana had been a ?Country? ship, licensed to trade between the English East India Company (HEIC)-ruled India and Canton, carrying cotton and opium to the Chinese, and returning with assorted ?China articles? to Calcutta and Madras. She made one round trip a year; out with the late summer monsoon, and back with the early Spring one.  Thanks to the (illegal) opium trade, it was a hugely lucrative business, and the Country ships returned every year with massive trade surpluses. These surpluses took the form either of bills drawn on the HEIC in London, or were carried in cash as Spanish silver dollars, minted in Mexico and freighted across the Pacific in Manila galleons. It was a thriving trade as the Napoleonic Wars finished, and maritime business revived; a record number of 88 foreign ships came to the Whampoa anchorage, eight miles down-river from Canton; in autumn 1816.
In Canton, official foreign trade was in the hands of thirteen Hong merchants who bought up all the foreigners imports, and sourced all their return cargoes. Small tongkangs took the cargo down from Canton to the waiting vessels. When the bitter winter gales had begun to ease, the ships moved down the pearl river to the South China sea, and spread their sails before the northeast monsoon winds, driving the tea-laden merchantmen South and Westwards to the scattered ?Spice Islands? of the Indonesian archipelago, and to India, the Cape of the Good Hope, and the established entreport ports of Western Europe. Around four weeks later they arrived in the Hoogly River, unloading their cargoes into the Customs houses in Calcutta. DIANA, although a Calcutta ship, was bound for Madras at the time she sank. She and another ship between them carried the annual consignment of ?China articles? for Madras, and her loss caused a grave shortage of these items until the next season.

The Salvage
During the first six months of 1994, DIANA was systematically identified, measured, mapped and excavated by a team of ten divers. Despite very poor underwater visibility, strong currents and deadly night time storms called Sumatras, MHS managed to complete the recovery without accident. TV cameras and lights were mounted on the divers helmets, and the entire underwater excavation was recorded on video. Representatives from the Malaysian Marine Department, and Museums Department, monitored the operation, and a representative sample of both organic and inorganic recoveries was donated to the Maritime Museum in Malacca. MHS found part of the coir anchor cable of the ship, and many metal parts; but the jarool wood of the hull was gone, consumed entirely by the insatiable teredo worm. From the cargo they recovered tutenague, alum rock, glass beads, green tea, ginger, rhubarb, ginseng, camphor, cassia, star anise, dried fish (now very wet), animal bones and straw. The ginger had been packed in ginger jars, still strapped and sealed as they had been in Canton in 1816.
Unlike the wood of the hull, the cedar planks of the chests containing the cargo were largely intact and many still carried the consignees marks. One chest in particular, bearing the words ?GC & CO, MADRAS NO.2? ?Keep this side up? helped identify the ship.

The Ceramics
The bulk of the cargo was of course the porcelain. Over eleven tons of porcelain, just under 24,000 intact individual pieces, were recovered from the wreck. Dinner plates, saucers, bowls, cups, bottles, tureens, serving dishes and jars, comprising in total over 200 different shapes or patterns, were brought ashore, washed, photographed, inventoried, and packed for shipment to Amsterdam.
Dorrian Ball; ?There were two great high-points in the salvage. One was finding the ships bell. Nothing is so evocative of life on board a ship, for a mariner, or a ships historian, as the bell which regulated all the daily routines. The watches, the church services, the meal times.
But recovering the porcelain gave us all just as much pleasure. The cargo contains porcelain from the early 19^th Century of a type very familiar to ceramicists. It marks the revival of the China Trade after the ending of war; old, established types of shape and pattern blend harmoniously with new innovations. Jingdezhen, China?s ?porcelain city? in Jiangxi Province, always contained conservative potters, producing wares are which they knew from long experience still remained in broad terms popular with western supercargoes in Canton. But there were new ingredients now, in the complex Asian maritime trade. Americans were coming to Canton directly, via California. This was a radical innovation after 1783, when the first Boston merchant by passed the old English East India Company monopoly on Asian trade to the Colonies, and sent a ship laden with ginseng to bring ?China goods? straight back to the Eastern seaboard.
Many American collections contain this sort of blue and white export porcelain; some of it with the Fitzhugh pattern, much with the distinctive rain cloud border that evolves from 18^th Century rim patterns. The porcelain was clearly popular in India, too; this was being imported for the cream of Madrassi society, the Anglo Indian upper class which bought its fashionable China goods to use during the vast rounds of social events that marked the cool weather season.
The porcelain is slightly less familiar, however, to Europeans than its predecessor before the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars. The European market changed at the end of the 18^th Century. Technology played a large part in this. New improved ceramic mixers pioneered especially by , Wedgwood, in England enabled cheaper, stronger vessels to be potted, for export all over Europe and to the colonies. And accompanying this innovation of the 18^th Century industrial revolution was another; the invention of transfer printing. This made it possible for potters, in Staffordshire and elsewhere, to manufacture much more cheaply long runs of identical pots; because the design, ?transferred? onto uncoated pot from an engraved copper plate, rather than hand painted, was almost infinitely reproducible to the same standard. This made manufacturing popular ceramics in Europe much cheaper, and largely eliminated the production cost advantages of Chinese export porcelain, which had enabled it to maintain its huge share of the market in Europe as late as the 1770?s. so the Diana Cargo marks a moment of transition in the taste and demand; one of the areas where this ?sealed time capsule? will continue to provide information for decades.

This project was the culmination of a diver?s dream for me. From nothing, with nothing more than a dream to drive us, my wife and I spent ten years searching for the DIANA. We finally found her, and by doing so, we recovered from complete obscurity, the splendid cargo offered for sale, 178 years later to the day that she sank beneath the waters of the Straits of Malacca.