Ms Bartle setting up the laser to sample a ceramic.

If you are about to spend a million dollars buying a fourteenth century Ming vase, how can you be sure it’s not a fake?

Until now there was always a risk that you were being sold a clever forgery, but a new forensic test developed by Western Australian chemists, Emma Bartle and Professor John Watling, has created what looks like a foolproof system for authenticating such antique porcelain.

Remarkably the test could also open a new door on Australia's early maritime history - including the controversial theory that an ancient imperial fleet of Chinese junks visited the country 250 years before the arrival of Captain Cook.

Ms Bartle developed the test as part of a PhD research project undertaken at the University of Western Australia.

What she has done is discover that all porcelain has its own unique ‘fingerprint’ which allows its history to be traced back to the precise quarry from where its clay was mined, the kiln in which it was fired, and the period in which it was manufactured.

Added to that, Ms Bartle has adapted a laser sampling technique originally developed by Professor Watling to fingerprint gold and diamonds, to determine the unique signature of the clay from any porcelain object that needs to be authenticated.

"What we do is fire the laser at the unglazed layer at the base of the porcelain," Ms Bartle told ScienceNetwork WA.

"The laser forms a crater on the surface of the ceramic. The crater is just 1/200mm deep which makes it completely invisible to the naked eye. Under vacuum, material from the crater is then pulled into a mass spectrometer which measures the composition of the ceramic."

To run a test sample takes just 30 seconds.

"All clays have different elemental compositions," Ms Bartle said. "Even if clay kiln sites are separated by just 200 metres, the ceramics produced from them would be slightly different.

"Clay is composed of numerous elements but by measuring the different levels of 46 of these elements we can determine the uniqueness of each clay deposit - its fingerprint."

For the past five years, Ms Bartle has been collecting the information to develop a highly detailed database that can now track clays and kilns that were used in centuries of porcelain production.

As well as data on the Ming Dynasty, she has also developed a database on Imari porcelain - white clay porcelain distinctive to Japan that was developed in the seventeenth century and first brought to world notice by the trading efforts of the Dutch East India Company.

Eventually Ms Bartle aims to build a database that covers all the world's major porcelains for the 14th Century to the present day.

Ultimately, she wants to make her database the core of a specialist service that can authenticate any piece of antique porcelain and so all but eliminate what has become an international racket in antique forgeries.

News of her authentication technique has started to spread and she has been asked to examine a number of privately-owned pieces of Ming Dynasty porcelain.

Ms Bartle has also been verifying the test by sampling porcelain artefacts taken from Western Australian shipwrecks like the Batavia and Zuytdorp.

"While maritime archaeologists are able to establish if porcelain pieces have been taken from a wreck this fingerprinting technique could be used in addition to the archaeologists’ expertise to scientifically confirm the origin of the pieces. It could also verify their authenticity in the case of forgers producing imitation copies of artefacts recovered from shipwrecks," she said.

The technique also opens up the possibility of verifying that Chinese junks visited Australia as far back as the back as 1421.

The story of Chinese landings - including at a site south of Bunbury - was most recently publicised by author, Gavin Menzies in his book: 1421 The Year China Discovered the World.

Although no sign has ever been found of Chinese wrecks - and the 1421 fleet is supposed to have left behind at least seven - there might still be some remnants of porcelain to be found.

"I certainly would like the chance to examine something like that," Ms Bartle said.