The historical origin of the development of international ceramic industry

 The origin of the international pottery industry has three major regions in history: East Asia, West Asia, North Africa, Europe, and the United States. The American ceramics industry has been independently and slowly discovered before Columbus discovered the American mainland. East Asian ceramics is mainly China's source and core continue to spread to the surrounding heat South, North Korea (Koryo), Japan and Southeast Asia.

 The development of medieval European ceramics was mainly influenced by China and West Asia. At first, the Arabs introduced Islamic pottery into Italy via Spain, and developed a unique style of tin glazed porcelain in Italy. The porcelain technology crossed the Alps in France. Tin glazed soft porcelain appeared until the 17th century Dutch tin glazed pottery was famous for imitation of Chinese blue and white and multicolored. The medieval European porcelain was developed under the influence of Islamic pottery and Chinese porcelain.

 Although many places in the pottery world were produced thousands of years ago, porcelain has been recognized as the invention of the Chinese. Since the 14th century, the Eastern and Western ceramic trades have caused a large loss of silver due to the huge trade deficit in Europe. In order to increase the wealth of the country, the European countries in the 18th century have stepped up the development of ceramics. The earliest porcelain in Europe was produced at the Meissen plant in Germany, and the porcelain technology spread to Italy, Britain and France.

 Japanese ceramic industry

 In 1616, Li Shunping, a Korean naturalized Japanese in Japan, discovered the porcelain clay in Arita, and successfully fired blue and white porcelain, proclaiming the coming of the white porcelain era. Japanese porcelain really flourished until the 1750s, China in 1644. As the Qing army entered the customs, the country was caught in war, and the export of Chinese porcelain was stagnant. Japanese porcelain took the opportunity to become the market darling. Since 1658, Japan has become an important exporter of porcelain to Asia, the Persian Gulf and the European market.

 Today, Japan is still a world-class ceramic power. Japan's pottery is more developed, and there are quite a large number of professional ceramic artists. Japan's daily-use ceramics have a large market share in the world's high-end market. In addition, Japan has been at the forefront of the world in the field of materials science, especially in the high-tech ceramic materials, leading and prominent position. In general, Japan, Europe, and even China have little difference in the level of ceramic materials research, but Japan has an absolute leading edge in the world in the field of new ceramic materials.

 The Japanese ceramic industry has the following characteristics:

 In terms of raw materials, due to insufficient supply of domestic ceramic raw materials, the number of imported ceramic raw materials from Japanese ceramics companies has increased year by year. For example, plastic kaolin raw materials need to be imported from South Korea and New Zealand, and the import volume has reached more than 50% of total imports. In addition, the amount of kaolin raw materials imported from the UK and China has increased year by year. With the import of raw materials, the cost of products increases, forcing companies to produce high value-added products and improve the grade of products. In the development and utilization of ceramic raw materials, Japan is no longer limited to the production of ordinary pottery and porcelain products in the past, but emphasizes more to meet the use functions and uses of daily-use ceramics, such as enhancing the antibacterial properties of ceramic tableware, emphasizing the sanitary porcelain. The anti-fouling and water-saving effects of the products; in the development of new products, they pay attention to the improvement of environmental protection standards and the benefits of human health care, such as the planning and treatment of pollution caused by lead and cadmium dissolution of glazes and pigments. For example, Japan's Toto Company combines Japan's advantages in new materials and electronics with ceramics to take advantage of electronic technology and artificial intelligence. Its sanitary brand TOTO has become the world's top brand of sanitary ware.

 2 Japanese porcelain has changed a lot in shape, decoration, color and function. It is unmatched by Japanese porcelain and Germany. According to its material science advantages, it has developed high-plasticity artificial clay to reduce the difficulty of molding. In order to speed up the design and development, Japan has not only realized computerization, but also implemented design materialization, that is, using the CAD/CAM language of computers, and using new manufacturing technologies such as light modeling. 3 Japanese ceramic production technology and technical equipment have basically completed high-tech transformation such as automation and intelligentization, such as continuous automatic material processing, high-strength magnetic iron removal process, isostatic pressing and hydroforming process, automatic glazing, automatic drying and even full Automatic control of firing technology, etc. Except for a very small number of processes that need to be improved, all parts that can be replaced by mechanical operations are fully automated.

 European Ceramics Industry

 In the European Community, there are 1,500 companies in the building porcelain, daily-use porcelain and sanitary porcelain industries, employing about 200,000 people. Building porcelain is the most important industry, accounting for 60% of annual sales of 14,000 MECU, and the remaining daily-use porcelain and sanitary porcelain are basically average. Daily porcelain and sanitary porcelain also have some concentrated production areas, but unlike architectural porcelain and sanitary porcelain production, which are concentrated in a small number of multinational companies, daily-use porcelain production is distributed in more than 100 independent production enterprises in Europe. The strong vitality of the European traditional ceramic industry lies in the continuous innovation of production processes and products. European machinery and equipment are sold all over the world. Although almost every country can produce ceramic equipment, its quality is not as good as that of European products.