100 Best Books on Chinese Porcelain and Ceramics

My list of “100 Best Books” on Chinese and Japanese Porcelain
Ever since I started the Gotheborg.com Help and Info page on Antique Chinese and Japanese porcelain, I have regularly got the question; – Which book do you think I should buy? Unfortunately there are no simple answer to that. There are lots of good books out there and no book covers everything. However, if you really want just one book, I recommend Chinese Ceramics, by He Li. It covers it all, it’s modern, it’s up to date and it shows good quality pieces from the entire Chinese history and it gives splendid value for money.

If you rather want a selection of the best Chinese porcelain pieces ever, the classic beauty of world class Chinese porcelain etc.; I think you should treat yourself to the two volume issue of Chinese ceramics in the Baur Collection, by John Ayers. Then I would feel safe that I would have put you on the right track.

However, the field of Asian Ceramics is really much larger than that. If you for instance are into export porcelain those two titles hardly don’t even touch that subject. It’s large and specialized and there are no affordable “covers it all” books in English. You will need to look into that yourself since there are really many different kinds of export porcelains. It got a history of its own and it differs very much depending on which market.

Anyway, the best I can do is to present to you the list below. They are my personal choices and the list is ever growing. It is sorted under different main headlines. Click on any of those, or directly on any of the titles under it.

All of these books – Not for sale!
I also need to tell that this is recommended reading only. I don’t sell these books, they are my own copies. Quite a lot of them are actually out of print. I have wanted to recommend them since they are all “good” from some point of view. Some might be chewier then others but none are directly bad or misleading. However, whenever possible, I have tried to add a link to a copy for sale at Amazon.com. The book pictures you find here, are of my own books, as they look in my book shelf. The editions you might find in the books stores might be other editions and look different.

Now you can start looking for books. Have fun!

Jan-Erik Nilsson
Gotheborg.com