About

Nankin is the old French name for Nanjing. For two hundred years it was also the name of things. It was the blue-and-white porcelain that reached Europe on the China trade. It was a thick cotton, first woven around Nanjing, that by 1800 was cut into uniforms and summer trousers from Paris to Boston. It was the soft chamois yellow of that cotton, a colour French still calls nankin.

In January 1752 the Dutch ship Geldermalsen left Canton with tea, gold and porcelain, and sank in the South China Sea. The tea settled over the porcelain and kept it safe for more than two centuries. When the wreck was found and its contents sold in Amsterdam in 1986, the sale was called the Nanking Cargo.

So a nankin was never one thing. It was whatever came from far away and made a home a little more interesting. Les Nankins takes the word at that size: cups and dishes now, then cloth, lacquer, screens and furniture.

Europe once paid for Chinese porcelain in silver, and spent a century trying to copy it. Good workshops in China still make beautiful things; what is hard today is telling them apart from the rest. That is the work we do. We choose every piece ourselves, we say plainly where it ships from and how long it takes, and shipping is part of the price.

Every piece is chosen by our passionate curators and ships straight from our partner workshops to your door.