Westerners are very particular about courtesy when dining, eating dishes in a fixed order. Even the manner of placing tableware is restricted.

Chinese are much easier at the table, and all they use are a bowl, chopsticks and a spoon. Just like the western saying where “less is more,” in Chinese traditional table ware is both simple and ingenious.

To treat the matter of eating as a part of ‘life art’, we can start from table ware.

A bowl, emerging from thousands of years of civilization

China is an ancient agricultural country, so that as early as the Neolithic Age, people had already understood to dine with bowls.

Bowls with emerald green grain, simple but elegant

As a daily necessity in contemporary China, the bowl, originated from the clay bowl and pottery bowl in the Neolithic Age, and is more or less the same with the ancient one in shape. After thousands of years, only the material, technique and decorative method has evolved.

The bowl, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, was hard to stand steadily on the flat, so that archaeologists believed that the ancients initially put bowls in holes dug on the ground. The earliest bowls were earthen, needing only 600 to 700 degree for firing. According to archeological findings and historical records, the first porcelain bowl appeared during the period of the Shang (about 1600 – 1100 BC) and Zhou (1122 BC – 256 BC) to Spring and Autumn (770 – 476 BC) and Warring States (475 – 221 BC) periods, which was an original work of celadon porcelain.

Till the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), the using of the bowl took on multiple purposes, divided from usage for holding rice, soup, dish, tea and wine, and its new main function was to serve as a sacrificial appliance. From primitive society to the Qin Dynasty (221 – 207 BC), commonly people used pottery ding (an ancient cooking vessel) or bronze ding for sacrificial ceremony, but from the Han Dynasty, big opening bowls came in to use for containing immolations. Up till now, the biggest blue-and-white porcelain has been found for sacrificial use.