That’s the story in a nutshell with Royal Delft in the Netherlands, the porcelain company (Koninklijke Porceleyne Fles) with roots going back to the second half of the 16th century.
The Royal Delft Museum and Factory for the 'Royal Delft Experience' tour.
The Dutch weren’t the inventors of blue pottery. They learned this skill from Italian potters and copied Chinese-style porcelain brought back by Dutch seamen from the Far East through the Dutch East India Company (VOC – Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), which by the way is the first publicly traded company in the world.
If there is another thing than trade that the Dutch did was good, that would have to be being master imitators of porcelain ware. Demand for blue porcelain skyrocketed and before long enough business was doing very well that the company made investments of more than 32 factories in Delft and a number in Amsterdam, Haarlem, and Middelburg.
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