Legacy and Continuity: Willow Pattern Ceramics and Stories of ’Other’.

In 2025, Stoke-on-Trent City Council marked the centenary of the City’s status through a year-long programme of cultural events. Among these, the exhibition Willow Pattern Ceramics and Stories of ‘Other’ was commissioned to critically reframe understandings of one of north Staffordshire’s most iconic and globally disseminated ceramic designs. The exhibition brought together objects to interrogate the complex and often paradoxical entanglements of Chinese ceramic traditions and British industrial production.

The exhibition examined the cultural and literary symbolism of the willow motif within Chinese visual culture; the processes of imitation, translation, and stylistic adaptation by which Chinese export porcelain informed the emergence of the Willow Pattern in Britain. It also considered the design’s subsequent re-circulation to China through late twentieth-century outsourcing practices undertaken by British manufacturers.

In conjunction with the exhibition, scholars from China and the United Kingdom were invited to develop these themes further through the international symposium Legacy and Continuity, held at Stoke Town Hall on 21–22 November 2025. The essays gathered in this publication both reflect and extend the contributions presented at that event.