Difference between ceramic and porcelain

People often mention porcelain when they talk about ceramic. They are both the art of fire and  soil. What’s the difference between ceramic and porcelain?

What’s ceramic?

Ceramic is the largest category of standard terminology, Ceramic often divided into two categories,pottery and porcelain. Pottery includes earthenware, stoneware and faience. porcelain includes soft-paste, hard-paste and bone china.

What’s china?

China is not a technical terminology, it often referred as all ceramic ware. Stemmed from the phase” Porcelain  from  China” from the 15 century, when Chinese ceramic products massively export to the West.

What’s porcelain?

Porcelain is a kind of white tough translucence ceramic body, it is formed in the kiln by high temperature firing and vitrification, usually covered with a layer of glaze and decoration.It can also be enamel painted on top of the glaze after first firing. Unglazed porcelain is called biscuit.

Porcelain is usually divided into two categories, hard-paste(also called genuine porcelain) and soft-paste(also called fake porcelain). In 1799, Josiah Spode developed a porcelain carcass containing bone ashes, which was durable and charming, this bone china later became the standard paste used in England.

Hard-paste ware was first manufactured in China in the 7th and 8th centuries AD, using locally available kaolin and white petuntse. Later, people in Europe have done a lot of attempts to copy genuine porcelain. From 1575 – 1587, people invented a kind of porcelain using high percentage glass which has been grid, and mix with clay so that it was translucent, this kind of porcelain is call soft-paste porcelain, bone china porcelain is developed from it.

Want to know more about the pottery? We will get to it in our next article.