Export porcelain fit for the Chinese emperor. Early Chinese blue-and-white in the Topkapĭ Saray Museum, Istanbul

The Topkapĭ Saray holds one of the world's largest collections of Chinese ceramics, but at the same time one of the least well known. It consists of over ten thousand pieces, of which roughly fifteen percent are on permanent display; only a few hundred items have ever been published, and not more than twenty-five objects have been on exhibition outside Turkey. To compare this collection with the even larger one in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, is quite instructive: the pieces are completely different and have almost no item in common in spite of the fact that they cover largely the same period. What is housed in the National Palace Museum is a substantial part of the former Imperial collection or, at any rate, had once belonged to the holdings of the Imperial palace in Beijing (Peking). It had then been packed up in 1931 when the Japanese invaded Manchuria, and after a sixteen-year trip through China from one supposedly safe place to another, had finally been transported from the mainland to Taiwan when Chiang Kaishek established his government there. It represents a superb cross-section of those ceramics that were produced for the Chinese home market, in particular for the Imperial court and the scholar-official elite with its high standards of artistic perfection.