New London exhibition from the Sir David Percival Collection has exquisite porcelain from Qing-dynasty, Ru ware and Jin

At the entrance of the British Museum’s new gallery of Chinese ceramics, from the Sir Percival David Collection, is a pair of Yuan-dynasty blue-and-white temple vases known as the David vases. These 63cm-tall vessels are often cited as the most important pieces of Chinese porcelain anywhere. Their significance lies in the inscription on their necks, which tells us a man called Zhang Wenjin presented them to a Daoist temple in 1351. Because of this unique dating, they have become a kind of Rosetta Stone for Chinese porcelain.

I felt conflicted. I have great respect for the scholarship of people like Sir Percival, but, as a vase-lover, I found these incredibly important pots, well, a bit ugly.

Don’t get me wrong: these are magnificent examples of ceramic art, made with a sophistication of technique that potters in Europe were unable to match for 350 years. But I can’t help thinking that maybe scholars rate them not because they are particularly beautiful, but because they are rare, very early, uniquely dated and reunited as a pair by this renowned connoisseur. I find their shape fussy and a bit lumpen. The painted decorations seem pedestrian and the elephant-head handles kitsch.

I mentioned my disquiet to the curator of the gallery, Jessica Harrison-Hall, and to my surprise she agreed: the David vases are not very beautiful. She said that’s why they are not included in one of the 12 central cases containing highlights of this exquisite collection. Pieces deemed beautiful enough include sublime Qing-dynasty serving dishes painted with peaches and prunus blossom, and a Ruware brush-washer, decorated with fish so delicately incised, they are almost lost under the minuscule crackle of the glaze. The Chinese were making ceramics of this refinement in the 11th century, when the English were eating off bits of wood.

Sir Percival originally gave his collection to the University of London, and from 1952 it was housed on Gordon Square. By 2005, its home needed extensive renovation. In stepped Sir Joseph Hotung, who suggested the British Museum take it on and sponsored a ceramic study centre, within which the new gallery is situated. Museums today often seem obsessed with footfall and attracting mass audiences with dinosaurs and fashion. I find it heartening to see a new project dedicated to the high-quality display and study of a relatively rarefied subject such as ceramics. The display cases themselves deserve special mention. They are elegantly lit and fitted with expensive nonreflective glass, which meant I was in constant danger of banging my nose as I leant forward to drink in another delicious glaze. Labelling is thankfully kept to a minimum, and full details and several views of each piece can be accessed on touch-screen computers.

Around the walls are ranked the rest of the 1,700 pieces not chosen as highlights. In each case, these are ceramics that would be the stars of lesser collections — a 3rd-century Jin basin, tiny open-work cups, as delicate as a leaf skeleton. I was lured to the back wall, where wares are ranged in a surprisingly wide palette of colours, from rich jade and oxblood to saccharine lime and turquoise, the bold colours and simple forms lending them a modern feel — then I checked the dates: 1403, 1426, 1435. In an age when pots made in computer-controlled conveyor-belt kilns are bought by the bootful from Ikea, it is hard to comprehend the skill that went into these masterpieces: hand-thrown and decorated, then fired in huge wood- or coal-fired sloping kilns, with no temperature gauge other than the experience of the potter’s eye to judge the colour of the flames within. These firings would take many days, with the kiln needing constant tending to maintain an even temperature and oxygen level. One mistake and thousands of pots, months of work, could be ruined. No wonder the Chinese call ceramics “the cruellest art”. The quality I most admire in antique potters is what I would call relaxed fluency. The ability to be effortlessly precise yet retain the organic zest of the handmade bestows on these works a nobility that anyone who has tried to master an unco­operative lump of clay can only marvel at. In this gallery, I felt like John Sergeant gazing on a performance by Darcey Bussell.