East India plates from Rörstrand Ostindia

Ostindie. Feldspar porcelain. Ostindia, voted “service of the century” in Sweden, owes its existence to a hidden treasure. After a ship returning from China sank off Gothenburg in 1745, a fragment of porcelain from the cargo somehow found its way into a cupboard at the Rörstrand factory. Many years later, in 1932, the wife of the factory manager, Knut Almström, spotted it and famously said: “Knut, I think it would be worth doing something with it…”. And so a shard of Chinese porcelain became the model for an iconic Rörstrand design.