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Between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, Chinese ceramics circulated across an extraordinary geographical range, from the porcelain shops of Isfahan to the Swahili trading towns of East Africa, from the warehouses of the Dutch East India Company at Cape Town to the homes of Maldivian islanders. Behind this global circulation lay a production system undergoing profound transformation: over five centuries, the centre of gravity of Chinese ceramic manufacture shifted from the inland kilns of Zhejiang and Jiangxi toward the coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, altering what was made, how it was made, and where it went. This transformation is widely recognised, but its spatial dimensions have never been systematically measured, its relationship to maritime trade has not been quantified, and its effects on what overseas consumers actually received have not been empirically tested.

This thesis addresses these gaps through an integrated analysis of three independent archaeological datasets: 1,104 kiln sites across 737 locations in six southern Chinese provinces; the ceramic cargoes of 69 shipwrecks; and assemblages from 267 archaeological sites in 19 countries across the Indian Ocean world. All three are analysed within a unified chronological framework and a standardised classification of 51 ceramic types. Aoristic analysis reconstructs probabilistic production trajectories despite imprecise dating in the kiln-site record. Two new spatial measures show that the average distance between active kilns and the nearest maritime port contracted by 48 per cent between 1300 and 1675, and that Jingdezhen and Fujian operated under fundamentally different models of production organisation. Shipwreck seriation identifies three structural breaks in the export trade, at c. 1500, c. 1567 and c. 1800, each involving simultaneous change in dominant type, production source and carrier.

The consumption data confirm that these transitions reached overseas markets, but reveal a critical asymmetry: Jingdezhen products continued to dominate distant assemblages until c. 1800, some 150 years after Fujian had surpassed it in the number of active kilns. Kiln counts, in other words, cannot be equated with market share. Understanding why a finely painted Jingdezhen blue-and-white dish reached a collector in Hormuz while a simply decorated Dehua bowl ended up in a Swahili household requires looking beyond the objects themselves to the production systems, trade networks and market structures that shaped their journeys. It is this complete trajectory, from kiln to consumer, that the thesis reconstructs for the first time.