The Ming Myth

Under the title ‘The Ming Myth’, the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne is presenting an exhibition dedicated to the art-historical and technical development of blue and white porcelain during the Chinese Ming dynasty. Around 80 selected exhibits from the museum's own collections, permanent loans from the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation as well as loans from other Cologne and Dutch museums and outstanding German private collections illustrate both artistic refinement and global historical contexts.

One of the most remarkable pieces is a blue and white bowl decorated with enamel colours, which the Cologne cathedral canon Count Eberhard von Manderscheidt brought back from a pilgrimage to Turkey in 1583 and later had stylishly set in silver. Today, this bowl is considered to be the earliest confirmed Ming porcelain in Germany and impressively illustrates the early North-South and East-West connections in which the Rhineland already played a central role at that time.

Thematically, the exhibition spans a multi-layered arc from aesthetic issues to socio-economic interdependencies and illustrates how the cultural exchange between Europe and China provided impulses for regional artistic understanding and international knowledge as early as the 16th century.