To appreciate how far we have to project ahead, we have to look back. One hundred years ago, roughly during America's Gay Nineties, the porcelain world was already teeming with European and American factories producing beautiful and distinctive ware for increasing numbers of middle class families that were just starting to emerge from the Industrial and Political Revolutions. A porcelain collector like us, trying to project the future might ask:
 
"What factory made this figurine?"

"Is it possible the piece we just bought might end up in a museum?"

"Will objects made in this factory be famous and prized or will they disappear, smashed and forgotten in the attics of history?"

"Should we buy it?
 

Two Centuries Ago

Two hundred years ago, in 1790, less than 35 European porcelain house had broken China's eight-hundred-year monopoly of the secret formula of hard-paste (called "true porcelain") porcelain. They were producing objects that could be afforded only by Europe's heads of state, nobility and the ultrarich. A middle class had not yet emerged. Printing technology was still so new that literacy was reserved for a precious few. There were few "museums", only "royal collections", not open to "the public" (or whatever they called us then).
Attempting to get into the collector's minds of this period, we can quickly sense there are no questions to be asked. For the sake of illustration, however, let's dream up an imaginary collector and attribute some questions to him:

"Does the Duke realise that the Meissen he's eating off of (and of which two of his unruly guests have already broken several pieces this evening) will be fit to rest in the world's finest museums and art galleries just a few hundred years from now? Can't he be more careful?"
"I wonder how the recent discovery of new clay at Limoges is going to affect the history of French porcelain?"

"I know England's Bow porcelain factory just closed but will their addition of pulverised animal bones to the mix have any affect on other English porcelains?"

We can go back 300 years, to 1692, but Europe's discovery of the formula for hard-paste porcelain lies some twenty years in the future. No European has the vaguest idea of what lies ahead.
Some elitists reading this story so far may have already started shuddering, sensing that we're headed toward a favourable comparison of the lladró collection and the collections of China's Ching-te Chen and Fukien province, Germany's Meissen, Frances Sevres, and other hallowed names of porcelain. Well, we are headed that way. These elitists, we suggest, may be blinded by the "Now" of the lladró business, forgetting that all those other factories also had their "Nows", now long gone.