The bottle shown here demonstrates the strong influence the Asian trade had on Dutch manufacturing during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Especially desirable were Chinese and Japanese porcelains since Europeans had not yet discovered how to produce the fine, white, and extremely hard porcelain ceramic. (Europeans only discovered the recipe for making porcelain in the early eighteenth century.) Dutch potteries quickly adapted new production techniques and forms of decoration. They refined their earthenware ceramics by glazing them with tin-oxide that produced a pure white surface and then decorated them with cobalt blue designs inspired by Asian porcelains. We know these ceramics today by the popular term “delftware” as potteries in Delft specialized in their production.