In the prologue of Valerie Hansen’s The year 1000 she gives a description of a market in the port city of Quanzhou, and says:

“A vigorous export trade financed these imports, and the most technologically sophisticated Chinese product was high-fired pottery. Low-cost competition came from Middle Eastern potters who mixed imitation glazes that resembled the glossy Chinese ceramics but weren’t fired at the same high temperatures.”

Unfortunately there’s no citation. Can anyone tell me more about these glazes, their compositions and firing methods?

I read Hassan Fathy’s Architecture for the poor a while back, about his attempt to build a better traditional Egyptian village, and he was also interested in setting up the village with low-fired ceramics, for cookware and tiles:

Besides weaving, I wanted to give the Gournis a practical way of making glazed pottery, for reasons explained earlier. The problem involved in making tiles is that there is, or was, no suitable glaze that melts at the temperatures obtainable in ordinary peasant kilns. So we had either to find a low-temperature glaze or a cheap and practical high-temperature kiln. I was told by the Japanese sculptor Isamu Negutchi that someone at the University of California had made a glaze that would run at 600°C, but although I have asked many people, no one else seems to have heard of it. I did, however, design a kiln, worked on the oil-and-water-drop principle, for firing bricks and lime. There is also, for anyone interested in this matter, the native pottery and ceramics industry of Rosetta, where once the most beautiful ceramic tiles were made, tiles that may still be seen in the old houses of Rosetta and Damietta.

I haven’t had any better luck finding info than he did. I’m also not sure what he means by an “oil-and-water-drop” kiln, unless it worked similar to recent designs for kilns that burn vegetable oil.

I’ve been experimenting with ash glazes, and I’ve found a lot of info about different ways people have sealed unglazed pottery, but surely there’s some ceramics history expert who can point me to some obscure book about 11th century middle eastern pottery or something?

Thanks in advance!