SHEILA CANBY: In the 17th century… the Ming Dynasty in China was in a decline… so in the middle third of the 17th century, demand for Chinese blue-and-white porcelains was not being met.And so Iranian potters started to produce blue-and-white ceramics in large numbers. And so we have a couple of examples of objects that depend, really, on Chinese prototypes. One is a kind of Iranian version of an elephant based on a Chinese vessel called a kendi. Now, in Iran, these were used as water pipes…. It's quite charming, because the trunk, of course, would have been the pipe part. And there were no elephants that were indigenous to Iran, so there was a bit of imagining going on here. The vase with the three small spouts and the large spout, is called a tulip vase. And there's a Chinese prototype, and then, actually, there are also very early; medieval, Iranian versions of this shape. Although there was a tulip craze in Holland, the tulips were coming from Ottoman, Turkey. …The word ‘turban’ actually, and ‘tulip’ are related, because Europeans would write the word for turban as tulipant, and then ‘tulip’ became the shortened version of that. And that's the name of the flower. They grew across the Middle East. These objects relate to the Chinese and Islamic connections on The Silk Road. If you haven’t heard about that already press PLAY.