The new European porcelain manufacturers were strongly influenced by oriental design and decoration. China had, after all, been Europe’s major supplier of both tea and porcelain for more than 100 years, and Japan had become an important source of porcelain wares during the second half of the 17th century when the collapse of the Ming Dynasty had caused the Chinese factories to close. Now, there was so much cross-fertilization of ideas and copying of decorations and designs that it was difficult to know where the original had come from. The Europeans would copy an idea from the Chinese, the Chinese and Japanese copied it from the Europeans, and then the Europeans often copied it back again.
