Pottery Trivia
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50 free Pottery trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Pottery is the oldest technology still practised by hand, and it keeps surprising: the first fired-clay object was a figurine, not a pot; a Roman rubbish hill is made of millions of smashed oil jars; and an 18th-century vase found in a London suburb went for fifty times its estimate. These 50 questions cover the ground a potter or a collector would expect: the classic ceramic bodies and what separates them, how glazes get their colour and why a kiln's atmosphere matters, the big traditions from Jomon Japan and Song China through the Islamic world to the Dutch, German and Staffordshire factories, the studio potters of the last century, the record-setting auction pieces, and the judges and hosts of The Great Pottery Throw Down. It suits anyone who has sat at a wheel, watched the Throw Down, or just wants to know why a cracked bowl can be worth more mended with gold. Techniques appear as definitions, never as instructions.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1955 ballad, in the Righteous Brothers' recording, plays over the pottery-wheel scene in the 1990 film Ghost?
Unchained Melody
Unchained Melody was composed by Alex North with lyrics by Hy Zaret, and Ghost uses Bobby Hatfield's 1965 Righteous Brothers vocal. The wheel scene has since been parodied in The Naked Gun 2½ and Wallace and Gromit.
Q 02Which Japanese art mends shattered ceramics with urushi lacquer dusted in powdered gold, silver or platinum?
Kintsugi
Kintsugi means 'golden joinery', and one theory traces it to shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, who sent a damaged tea bowl to China and got it back crudely stapled with metal.
Q 03Which English football club, raised among the bottle ovens that fired Britain's tableware, is nicknamed The Potters?
Stoke City
Stoke City took The Potters from the Staffordshire pottery industry around it; the club claims 1863 as its founding year, but its first recorded match came in 1868. Stanley Matthews of Hanley debuted in 1932 aged 17.
Q 04What does 'terracotta', the name for the porous reddish clay of the Qin emperor's buried army, mean in Italian?
Baked earth
Baked earth, from the Latin terra cocta, is fired low enough to stay porous, so unglazed terracotta is never watertight. Etruscan sculptors preferred it to stone even for the near life-size Apollo of Veii.
Q 05Marco Polo's word for Chinese porcelain, porcellana, was the Italian name for the shell of which sea creature?
Cowrie
Cowrie shells share porcelain's smooth, translucent white surface, and Polo's Il Milione is the first European mention of the material, in the 13th century.
Q 06Josiah Wedgwood, who founded his Staffordshire pottery firm in 1759, was the grandfather of which naturalist?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin and his wife Emma were both grandchildren of Josiah Wedgwood, who was elected to the Royal Society in 1783 for a pyrometer rather than for his pots.
Q 07Which element's oxide coloured Fiesta dinnerware's orange-red glaze until the US government seized it in WWII?
Uranium
Uranium oxide left Fiesta red faintly radioactive, and the colour vanished when the government confiscated the maker's uranium stocks; it returned in 1959 using depleted uranium.
Q 08Wedgwood's celebrated 1790 copy of the Portland Vase imitates a Roman original made of what?
Cameo glass
Cameo glass, not clay, is what the Roman vase is made of, and the British Museum original was smashed in 1845 by a visitor who had been drinking all week and threw a sculpture onto its case.
Q 09What did billionaire Liu Yiqian do with the Ming 'chicken cup' he bought for US$36 million?
Drank tea from it
Liu drank tea from it in front of the cameras, right after the 15th-century Chenghua cup set the auction record for Chinese porcelain at Sotheby's Hong Kong, and was accused of disrespect at home.
Q 10Which Dutch city's blue-and-white earthenware was sold from about 1600 as a cheap stand-in for Chinese porcelain?
Delft
Delft's potters moved into buildings left empty as the city's breweries declined, some keeping the old brewery names, and only one of those 17th-century factories, De Porceleyne Fles of 1653, survives.
Q 11Japan's Jōmon pottery, among the world's oldest, is named for patterns made by pressing what into the wet clay?
Rope
Rope pressed into the wet clay gives Jōmon its name: the American zoologist Edward S. Morse dug up such sherds in 1877 and called them 'cord-marked', and the Japanese translation stuck for the pottery and its whole era.
Q 12Athenians voting to banish a citizen scratched his name onto what, which gave the practice of ostracism its name?
Potsherds
Potsherds, ostraka in Greek, were the cheap, durable scrap everyone had to hand, so across the ancient Mediterranean they doubled as notepaper, receipts and ballots.
Q 13Monte Testaccio, an artificial 35-metre hill in Rome, is built almost entirely of some 53 million discarded what?
Amphorae
Q 21The Great Pottery Throw Down began on BBC Two in 2015; which broadcaster took it over in January 2021?
Channel 4
Channel 4's sister channel More4 revived the show in 2020, three years after its last BBC series, and Channel 4 itself took it from the 2021 series; each episode ends by naming a 'potter of the week'.
Q 22What is 'slip', the stuff a potter trails on for decoration and brushes onto scored edges to join pieces?
Liquid clay
Liquid clay with no fixed ratio of water is slip, and ware decorated with it is slipware; poured into a plaster mould it becomes slip casting, the basis of mass-produced figurines.
Q 23What does a potter call ware that has been through the kiln once but carries no glaze yet?
Bisque
Amphorae of the 70-litre Dressel 20 type, shipped full of olive oil from southern Spain, were smashed and stacked there for about a century from AD 140.
Q 14A Qianlong vase knocked down for £43 million at a small Ruislip saleroom in 2010 had turned up where?
In a house clearance
In a house clearance at a bungalow in Pinner, auctioneers found the 18th-century vase, estimated at up to £1.2 million; the £43 million sale then stalled for two years, and the vase finally changed hands for a reported £20-25 million.
Q 15Which metal's oxide, imported from Persia as 'Islamic blue', coloured Ming blue-and-white porcelain?
Cobalt
Cobalt is one of the very few pigments that survives porcelain's firing heat, and the David Vases dated 1351 anchor the chronology of the ware.
Q 16Which Japanese tea-bowl ware, pulled from the kiln while still glowing hot, is named from a seal meaning 'enjoyment'?
Raku
Raku began when tea master Sen no Rikyū had the tile-maker Chōjirō hand-mould bowls in the 16th century, and the family is now on its 16th generation, Raku Kichizaemon XVI.
Q 17Which novelist set Anna of the Five Towns in the Potteries, leaving out one of its six towns?
Arnold Bennett
Arnold Bennett, born in Hanley, gave the Potteries towns new names in his fiction but counted only five, saying it sounded better than six; the omitted Fenton is now nicknamed 'the forgotten town'.
Q 18The Willow pattern looks Chinese, but its bridge, willow and two birds were first drawn in which country?
England
England is where the design took shape, in imitation of Chinese wares, and the 'ancient legend' of two lovers turned into birds is an English invention too.
Q 19Josiah Spode's 1790s recipe owes its whiteness and strength to which unusual ingredient, about half the mix by weight?
Bone ash
Bone ash, calcined animal bone, makes up about 50% of the traditional bone china body alongside 25% china clay and 25% china stone, and lets it be made thinner than any other whiteware.
Q 20Which artist, whose vases feature his teddy bear Alan Measles, won the 2003 Turner Prize?
Grayson Perry
Grayson Perry decorates classical vase shapes in bright colours with subjects at odds with their prettiness, and he gave the 2013 BBC Reith Lectures, titled Playing to the Gallery.
Bisque, or biscuit, has had one firing and is left porous on purpose, so it soaks up liquid glaze evenly before the second, or glost, firing; clay that is dry but still unfired is greenware.
Q 24Wedgwood's unglazed ware with white classical reliefs on a pale blue ground is known by what name?
Jasperware
Jasperware took Wedgwood years of experiments to perfect, and he named it after the stone jasper; his 1790 copies of the Portland Vase were made in it.
Q 25Which Great Pottery Throw Down judge, once singer in the punk band The Wigs, is famous for weeping over good pots?
Keith Brymer Jones
Keith Brymer Jones first touched clay at 11, when a teacher handed out lumps of it in class and he shaped his into an owl; his 2022 memoir is Boy in a China Shop.
Q 26Pottery sherds from Xianren Cave in Jiangxi, China, the oldest known anywhere, are roughly how old?
20,000 years
20,000 years puts the Xianren sherds at the height of the last Ice Age, some ten millennia before farming; the foragers who made the pots may have cooked in them, and a 2012 study in Science fixed the date.
Q 27The best-known fired-clay figurine from Dolní Věstonice in Moravia, made some 29,000 years ago, depicts what?
A nude woman
A nude woman, the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, is among the oldest ceramics known, fired at 500–800 °C millennia before anyone made a pot, and a 2004 scan found a child's fingerprint fired into her surface.
Q 28Which Athenian vase style of about 520 BC leaves figures in the clay's own colour and paints the background black?
Red-figure
Red-figure let painters draw details with a brush instead of scratching them through black paint, and the Andokides Painter usually gets the credit for inventing it.
Q 29The Euphronios Krater was painted in Athens, but in 2008 the Met returned it to which country, where it was looted?
Italy
Italy got it back because the krater had been looted from an Etruscan tomb near Cerveteri in 1971, a year before the Met bought it; it shows the death of Sarpedon, carried off by Sleep and Death.
Q 30Which Chinese dynasty's tomb camels and horses wear the amber, green and cream lead glaze called sancai?
Tang
Tang (618–907) sancai means 'three colours'; a rare fourth, blue, came from an imported pigment and was used sparingly, and the big figures were cast in sections as grave goods.