Porcelain

A Chinese ginger jar beside a Noritake dinner service:

is a fair picture of what Panamanian china cabinets hold, and the two are judged in different ways. Table porcelain is the bulk of it: dinner services from Noritake in Japan, from Rosenthal and the Bavarian factories in Germany and from Limoges in France, plus English bone china tea sets such as Royal Albert’s Old Country Roses, a pattern buyers recognise from across the room. Chinese ginger jars, blue-and-white vases and rice-grain bowls are judged on age and hand painting instead, not on how many pieces survived. Figurines are valued one by one. Anything more than a century old is judged alongside furniture and silver under antiques, and cut-crystal animals, which are glass rather than porcelain, have their own shelf under Swarovski.

Bone china or hard porcelain for a table that gets used:

is the first choice, and a strong light tells you which one you are holding. Against a window, bone china glows a warm ivory and shows the shadow of your fingers, hard porcelain looks cooler and whiter, and stoneware sold as porcelain stays opaque, feels heavier and knocks dully instead of ringing when tapped. Gold and platinum bands decide how a set lives: they spark in a microwave and fade in a dishwasher, so a gilded service is for guests and plain white is for every day. For daily use, pick a pattern still in production: replacements are easy to find, and a discontinued plate can take years.

An inherited gold-rimmed service:

sits a long way from what a new one costs. Most new porcelain on Panamanian tables is made in China, and a plain twelve-piece set starts around $35, while a gilded service from Noritake or one of the European houses runs into the thousands new. Used, a full gilded service seldom brings more than a few hundred dollars, because few households still want ninety-odd pieces that cannot go in the dishwasher or the microwave. What holds its money is the piece someone is hunting for: the missing cup, the sugar bowl lid, the oval platter.

Reign marks on the base of a Chinese vase:

prove much less than sellers hope. Chinese potters have painted the marks of earlier emperors on their work for centuries as a tribute, and a six-character Kangxi or Qianlong mark turns up just as readily on a vase made a few years ago. Judge the rest instead: an unglazed foot ring with natural grime and even wear rather than a brown wash or sanding marks, brushwork that varies in the blue rather than the flat dots of a printed transfer under a loupe, and a weight that suits the size. Table porcelain fails more simply. Run a fingertip round every rim and the foot of each cup for chips, then flick the piece with a fingernail: a clear ring means sound, a dull clack means a hairline crack. Look for gilding worn thin where plates were stacked, and for a patch that shines differently or glows oddly under an ultraviolet torch, which usually marks a glued and repainted repair.

A dinner service counted plate by plate:

draws replies that a vague “complete set” never gets. List it by type and say what is missing, because cups break far more often than saucers and buyers spot the mismatch. Photograph the backstamp, which carries the maker and pattern name a collector searches for, show chips and worn gilding up close, and say whether the set went in the dishwasher. For a Chinese piece, photograph the base and foot ring as well as the decoration, and describe the mark without assigning it a dynasty. Many of these services leave a family house in Chitré or Las Tablas when the owners move to an apartment with no china cabinet, and whoever collects one will tap every cup and turn over every plate before packing, so lay it all out on a table with newspaper to hand.