Barbara,
 
There is a major difference between the ceramics used by Chinese workers  and 
the material shipped to American and British markets for household  
ornamentation. The latter became popular in American Victorian houses following  the 
1876 and 1893 Expositions. Ornamental Asian ceramics provide an opportunity  to 
test for class status in domestic behavior. The so-called Geisha  designs were 
applied to a variety of expensive to cheap export  ceramics in Japan, Korea 
and China through the late 19th and through  much of the 20th century. Very 
fine chargers, tea sets or flat ware with  hand-painted temple, water and temple, 
or tea ceremony designs were more  expensive than the mass-produced 
varieties. Cheaper mass-produced transfer or  stencil outlines accented by limited and 
sloppy hand-painting were and are  available in a variety of retail outlets. 
However, Japanese ceramic collectors  have produced large volumes of books on 
Asian export ceramics and care should be  taken to mis-interpret mass-produced 
ceramics with American retail costs, as  some of those command high prices in 
their collector markets. 
 
One problem with scaling is that even the poorest families competed with  
wealthy families to present a nicely decorated parlor or serve guests on fine  
tea sets. This is not to say that generalities cannot be tested against working, 
 middle, and high economic classes or by ethnic groups for quality of Asian  
ornamental ceramics. At the Alicante site at 5th and Redwood Streets in San  
Diego, California, my crew recovered tea set remains from a 1910 medical  
doctor's house that I believe reflects American high economic class parlor  
display. Photographed with a macro-lens, samples of tea cups exhibited  exceedingly 
tiny people with fine detail in their faces and clothing. On the  other side of 
the coin, the Roeslein Homestead on the San Dieguito River in San  Diego 
County, California yielded a pre-1917 working class household Asian  ceramics that 
were mass-produced and only one or two specimens of any design. I  believe 
more work needs to be done before anyone can attempt economic scaling on  Asian 
ornamental parlor ceramics.
 
Ron May
Legacy 106, Inc.