Large Jar or Martaban
This impressive storage vessel is covered with a beautiful light brown to ochre-colored glaze. The rounded shoulders of the jar rise into a narrow neck, which ends in a slightly projecting, angular rim.
The six small handles positioned on the shoulders of the vessel are shaped as tigers. These handles served for securing the jar with ropes for transport over land and sea. On the backs of the small tigers, the Chinese character Wang (“King”) is engraved.
The body of the vessel is encircled by relief decoration depicting tigers and flowering scrolls. The lower third of the body is vertically ribbed and transitions into the unglazed base. According to the Princessehof Museum in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, vessels of this type were probably produced in the kilns of Go-Sanh in Vietnam and are provisionally dated there to the 14th to 16th century.
An exceptionally beautiful storage jar in perfect condition and proportion, with a wonderful patina, as is usually found only in museum collections, such as the collection of the Princessehof Museum in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands.
The history and origin of the term “Martaban”:
Martaban, sometimes also pronounced Martavan, were large, heavy storage jars used to transport goods by ship from the port of Martaban to Southeast Asia, India, and the Middle East, among other destinations. These beautiful and robust storage and transport vessels were named after the port of Martaban, today Mottama, which is located in Mon State.
Mottama lies on the northern bank of the Salween River, opposite Mawlamyine, the capital of Mon State. Here is the Gulf of Martaban, into which the Irrawaddy and Salween rivers flow. In written accounts from the 14th century, more precisely in 1350, Ibn Battuta, who visited the port of Martaban during his great journey, reports:
“Martabans are large vessels filled with pepper, lemons and mangoes, all treated with salt for a sea voyage” (Gutman: Burma’s Lost Kingdoms. The Martaban Trade, 2001, pp. 106 – 112).
Ibn Battuta was a 14th-century world traveler, adventurer, scholar, diplomat, and chronicler. With his travel book Rihla (“Journey”), he wrote one of the most important travel accounts of the Middle Ages. In 1325, one year after the death of Marco Polo, the 22-year-old trained jurist from Tangier in Morocco set out on one of his great journeys. By ship, carriage, and camel, he explored East Africa, the Persian Gulf, Indonesia, India, China, and Spain. Ibn Battuta is regarded as the “Marco Polo of the Orient.”
In particular during the 16th and 17th centuries, the port of Martaban played an important role in the maritime transport of Chinese goods to the West. The significance of Martaban as a production center for ceramics can be traced back to the 7th century AD.
Literature and comparable museum Martaban, documented in: “The Collection of Chinese and Southeast Asian Jars” (Martaban, Martavanen) Princessehof Museum, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands (please see depiction below):
The collection of large stoneware jars at the Princessehof goes back to Nanne Ottema (1874 – 1955). He collected virtually everything in the field of applied arts and was particularly fortunate with Chinese ceramics. Ottema had a genuine interest in Chinese export wares — quite unlike most collectors of his time, at the end of the 19th and in the first decades of the 20th century, and even to this day.
On the one hand, he could not afford expensive “imperial” wares. On the other hand, it seems that he truly appreciated the export ceramics found in Indonesia, then the Dutch East Indies, a Dutch colony.
Ottema devoted Chapter 11 of his 1943 publication to his collection of Martavans. He refers to Portuguese and Dutch literary sources of the 16th and 17th centuries and emphasizes their importance as trade goods in commerce between China, India, the Middle East, and the West. Ottema appears to have discussed the subject of jars with other museum curators as well. The archives of the Princessehof Museum contain letters exchanged in 1928 between Nanne Ottema and R. L. Hobson (1871 – 1942), curator at the British Museum and a leading authority on Chinese ceramics. Hobson wrote:
“… I am very interested to learn that you are engaged with Chinese ceramics and porcelain from the East Indies. We have some curious pots from Borneo and other places, but we do not have any of the large jars.”
The first exhibition devoted exclusively to Martaban jars was organized in 1964 at the Princessehof Museum in Leeuwarden. On behalf of the OKS, Hessel Miedema (1929 – 2015), curator of the museum, published a small catalogue in which more than eighty jars from the Princessehof collection were presented for the first time.
Our knowledge of these jars is closely connected with the groundbreaking book by Barbara Harrisson, Pusaka – Heirloom Jars of Borneo, published in 1986. Barbara Harrisson, born in Silesia, Germany, traveled by chance with her first husband to Borneo. There she met the Englishman Tom Harrisson (1911 – 1976). She divorced and married Tom.
Additional text for the martaban (depicted below/museum reference):
This large storage jar is closely connected to the life of Barbara Harrisson. Around 1960, it was presented to her by Lawai Jau, chief of the Kenyah in Sarawak. He told her that the vessel had been in his family’s possession for four to five generations. Barbara took the jar with her to the United States, to Cornell, to Perth in Australia, and later to Leeuwarden in the Netherlands. She donated it to the OKS, and today it forms part of the museum collection.
The jar has rounded shoulders, a narrow neck, a squared rim, and six handles shaped as tigers, on whose backs the Chinese character Wang (“King”) is engraved. The body is decorated with reliefs depicting tigers among scrolling foliage and relief blossoms. The lower part of the vessel is covered with a light brown glaze. The base is flat and unglazed.
Vessels of this type were probably produced in the kilns of Go-Sanh in Vietnam. They can provisionally be dated to the 14th to 16th century.
