From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market:

Jingdezhen Porcelain Production as Global Visual Culture

Ellen Huang

Journal of World History, Volume 23, Number 1, March 2012, pp. 115-145
(Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2012.0028

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/479016

Access provided at 22 Jun 2019 13:03 GMT from University of Newcastle

 From the Imperial Court
to the International Art Market:
Jingdezhen Porcelain Production
as Global Visual Culture

ellen c. huang
University of San Francisco, San Francisco

D uring a critical period of the twentieth-century formation of

Western, especially British, collections of porcelain as “Chinese
art,” one of the world’s most influential collectors of ceramics from
China, Percival David, declared in 1933 that “no illustrated work of
antiquity that deals with Chinese ceramics has survived to us in any
form.” 1 However influential and knowledgeable a ceramics and Chi-
nese art specialist David was, his statement regarding porcelain illus-
trations was altogether misleading. Visual images germane to the topic
of ceramics from China had already been in widespread circulation by
this time. Moreover, some of the most prominent examples of such
illustrations were already a global phenomenon: woodblock prints of
ceramic production that appeared in technical manuals sketched in
Jingdezhen, China, were also bought and sold as export watercolors
and wallpapers, displayed and used in East Asia as well as Europe.
None of these aforementioned illustrations satisfied Percival David,
whose ambitions included developing a public understanding of Chi-
nese ceramic objects. David eventually managed to do so in the insti-

1
  Percival David, “Hsiang and His Album,” Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society
11 (1933–1934): 22.

Journal of World History, Vol. 23, No. 1

© 2012 by University of Hawai‘i Press

115
116 journal of world history, march 2012

tutionalized form of a modern museum devoted solely to the subject

of Chinese ceramics.2 Thus, David was looking, in both senses of the
word, for a specific class of pictures portraying ceramic objects and the
“technical peculiarities of execution of the objects.” 3 Speaking from the
perspective of a collector, he desired reference material that presented
porcelain as art objects: exceptional and identifiable, much in the vein
of a modern museum catalogue.4 His pejorative attitude toward Chi-
nese technical books that focused on facture aligned David (purpose-
fully) with the ideology of Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911)
dynasty scholar-connoisseurs themselves, who similarly prioritized gen-
teel values over specialist knowledge.5 His agenda thus rendered other
visual depictions of porcelain irrelevant and allowed him to make an
overgeneralized statement, erasing a global history of ceramic illustra-
tions that occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This paper recovers this history in order to rectify the dismissive
generalization put forth by Percival David in the 1930s. While existing
scholarship either denies their existence (in the manner of David) or
imputes their origins to foreign demand alone, I describe the emer-
gence, circulation, and provenance of major visual sources on Jingde-
zhen ceramic history and production. First, I begin with an overview
of the various visual mediums that have included ceramics as part of
their pictorial content. Second, I give an account of the origination
of the pictorial motif Taoye tu. Here, the term Taoye tu refers to more
than just the Chinese character phrase’s literal meaning, pictures of

2
  Stacey Pierson, Collectors, Collections and Museums: The Field of Chinese Ceramics in
Britain, 1560–1960 (London: Peter Lang, 2007), chap. 4.
3
  David, “Hsiang and His Album,” p. 22.
4
  I use singular in the sense of artwork that is valued from the perspective of the viewer
or beholder as something that is unique and relatedly, authentic. The idea that a piece of
art should not be able to be reproduced is prevalent in most modern aesthetic thinking after
Kant, and the reproducibility of art is most carefully considered in Walter Benjamin’s essay
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” written in 1936. See also John
Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972). Walter Benjamin, an important
theorist of art and cultural history (of Europe), observed the effect of film and other tech-
nologies of mechanical reproduction, such as photography, on art’s experience. Included in
the shift from handicraft and manual production of works of art to mechanical methods, he
notes a diminution of the singularity of an artwork, since mechanically reproduced works
such as prints render the need for “authenticity” irrelevant. Whereas before, the artwork was
valued as an object of cult value, the work is now appreciated for its “exhibition value.” An
artwork’s exhibition value draws attention away from the artwork’s privileged entity to the
space between the viewer and the artwork.
5
  For the values and aesthetic trends of the Confucian scholar in Ming and Qing soci-
ety, see the classic study by Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: The
Problem of Intellectual Continuity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), pp. 15–26.
Huang: From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market 117

porcelain production. Rather, it encompasses a specific iconographical

theme that began at the Qing dynasty court and acquired a global audi-
ence of consumers on a diverse media. To this second end, I explain
the historical impetus and the Qing dynastic context that spurred the
production of the first instance of Taoye tu in visual form: a couple or
perhaps even a triumvirate of Qing court painting albums that were
made to depict porcelain manufacturing at the height of the high-Qing
period, or early to mid eighteenth century. In the final section, I discuss
the production and dissemination of the visual genre from the Qing
imperial court to European, Japanese, and North American consum-
ers throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By focusing
on the spread of the porcelain manufacturing motif in prints, paint-
ings, and porcelain of the Qing period (1644–1911), I show how the
theme underwent parallel developments at various levels of produc-
tion and social consumption. In doing so, the artistic, cultural, and
political factors that sustained this theme may be better understood
across the boundaries of political units, nations, periods, or mediums.
To continue to ignore this history would be to deny the entangled rela-
tionships between art, industrial transfer, and colonial endeavors of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Chinese art history and world
history as well.
The following narrative demonstrates two shifts in the global circu-
lation of Jingdezhen porcelain. The first shift consists of a move from
late Ming images of ceramics technology to eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century Qing dynastic sets of images of production processes. Crucially,
images in circulation during the Qing dynasty were sequentially viewed
and created an aesthetic illusion of reproducing the flow of time. The
second shift, marked by the existence and proliferation of these visual
sources, is from the exchange of porcelain objects to the exchange of
the images themselves. Henceforth, there were two networks of porce-
lain current in circulation during the eighteenth century and expand-
ing through the nineteenth. The first circuit was one in which material
objects were central, a market in which people actually bought and
collected porcelain. The second was characterized by the demand and
consumption of porcelain’s production in visual terms; here, people
did not necessarily buy porcelain objects per se. Rather, they appreci-
ated and participated in an aesthetic culture of porcelain production.
This two-pronged exchange trajectory flowed within and beyond East
Asia and subsequently appeared in a transmuted form in Europe in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As images with a global
trajectory, these pictures truly are world historical. As images depict-
ing a sequential process, the world history of these pictures takes on a
118 journal of world history, march 2012

second meaning. In their linear temporality, they enabled an imagining

of material process that in turn shaped a universal viewing experience
central in the production of modern selves and subjectivity.6

Early Visual Images of Ceramics

Visual artworks that included representations of ceramics in their pic-

torial composition appear as early as the mid second century b.c.e. The
earliest known paintings that portray ceramics include the Mawangdui
silk banner, which depicts an array of bronze, lacquer, and pottery ves-
sels at a funeral event, and some tomb wall murals dating to the Eastern
Han (25–220 c.e.).7 A painting made of ink and color on silk, pos-
sibly dating to the tenth or early twelfth century of the Song dynasty,
depicts porcelain dishes, ewers, and bowls in an orderly table arrange-
ment. The scene pictured in the painting expresses the importance of
ceramic objects in ordinary use.8 Another notable and similar example
is the renowned painting of the last Northern Song dynasty emperor,
attributed to Emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126) in the early twelfth
century. In his Wenhui tu (Literary gathering), ceramic vessels in the
form of dishes, bowls, and wine ewers populate a table setting depicting
the elegant consumption of food and drink by educated and culturally
refined men.9 These foregoing paintings appeared on various media,

6
  The relationship between temporal seriality and reading in subject formation and
communal experience is explored in Benedict Anderson’s work on nationalism and his con-
cept of seriality, articulated in “Nationalism, Identity and the Logic of Seriality” in Specters
of Comparison: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 29–45.
For the relationship between temporal experience, historical construction, and identity in
the field of Chinese history, see Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Question-
ing Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
7
  The following discussion draws upon an article by Roderick Whitfield, who provides
a well-documented overview, “Ceramics in Chinese Painting,” in Imperial Taste: Chinese
Ceramics from the Percival David Foundation, ed. Rosemary Scott (San Francisco: Chronicle
Books, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art),
pp. 125–132. For reproduced images, see Hunan sheng bowuguan, ed., Changsha Mawangdui
yihao Hanmu [#1 Tomb at Mawangdui, Changsha] (Beijing: Wenwu, 1973), pl. 77, and
Nanjing Museum and Shandong Bureau of Antiquities, ed., Yinan guhuaxiang shimu fajue
baogao [Report on the Stone Tomb with Ancient Engravings at Yinan] (Beijing: Wenhuabu
Wenwu Guanliju, 1956), pl. 83.
8
  Whitfield, “Ceramics in Chinese Painting,” p. 126. The painting’s title is Night Feast
of Han Xizai, handscroll, ink and color on silk, Song dynasty, possibly early twelfth century,
Palace Museum, Beijing.
9
  This painting has been reproduced numerous times. For just a few recent examples,
see National Palace Museum, Grand View: Painting and Calligraphy from the Northern Song
Dynasty Exhibition Catalogue (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 2006), cat. 24, and also
Huang: From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market 119

including tomb walls, silk canvases, and textiles. Their visual composi-
tion included ceramic objects; however, the paintings do not feature
porcelain as their primary subject matter.10 Instead, they portray scenes
of daily life relevant for a certain strata of society—the elite, educated
men for whom ceramic objects were used or displayed in social rituals
such as burial or dining. In the case of the Huizong emperor’s Literary
Gathering painting, the function of ceramics extends even to the pale
white stools on which the male figures sit, presumably made of North-
ern Song qingbai porcelain from Jingdezhen.
Some Ming and Qing dynasty period paintings also featured ceram-
ics in functional contexts, though they generally fall under the cat-
egory of paintings referred to as jingwu (quiet objects). Contrasted
with paintings that depict ceramics in large dining sets being used in
social contexts, these fourteenth- through seventeenth-century paint-
ings often pictured a flower arrangement displayed in a single ceramic
vase or plant container.11 These paintings, usually in the form of a
hanging scroll, functioned as decorative gifts. A superficial reading of
such paintings may instantly tempt one to conclude that their nature
was the Chinese equivalent of Dutch still life painting. However, the
painted scenes of a seemingly domestic arrangement of home décor
found their ultimate use in their status as exchanged gifts. They were
meant to be displayed among scholar-elites to express well-wishes from

National Palace Museum, Grand View: Special Exhibition on Ju Ware (Taipei: National Palace
Museum, 2006), pp. 128, 171–175. The dating of the Wenhui tu is the subject of scholarly
debate, precisely because of the ceramics depicted. For instance, the large, densely decorated
blue-and-white serving platter held by a man wearing a blue robe is usually not known to
have been in use or production during this time, and would postdate the painting to the
period of the fourteenth century, during which there were changes in the dietary habits of
the ruling Mongol dynasty that affected the size, shape, and décor of blue-and-white wares.
Another point of contention about the dating to the Huizong reign period stems from the
use of qingbai porcelain to make relatively complicated shapes and structures, like the stools
on which the men sit. As a result of the types of body material constitution qingbai porcelain
made during the early 1100s, this larger, heavier form would not have been technically
possible.
10
  From Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study
of Renaissance Art,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts; originally published in Studies in Iconol-
ogy: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, 1939). I borrow the phrase
“primary subject matter” from Panofsky’s seminal formulation on art historical method, in
which he outlined three levels of art historical understanding. He used “primary subject
matter” to refer to elemental visual forms that appear on the surfaces.
11
  Some well-known examples are the paintings of the extreme expressionist painters
such as Bada Shanren, whose real name was Zhu Da, and Dao ji (Zhu Ruoji), also known
as Shi Tao, active between the years 1626 and 1705, and 1642 and 1707, respectively. For
reproductions, see Whitfield, “Ceramics in Chinese Painting,” pp. 125–132.
120 journal of world history, march 2012

one to another, often taking place around a festival or holiday on the

lunar calendar.12
Qing imperial rule (1644–1911) provided the crucial context for the
appearance of works whose specific pictorial focus are ceramic objects,
rather than works that simply included ceramics on the painted surface.
As is well known, the great Qing emperors established and expanded a
multiethnic empire to its greatest territorial extent, consolidating the
peripheries to include such religiously, linguistically, and politically
disparate areas as Taiwan, Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang
(Chinese Turkestan).13 The ruling family were themselves a non-Han
minority; they were descendants of skilled horseback riding peoples of
the northern Altaic steppes. In order for the Qing emperors to solidify
rule over such a diverse expanse, they constructed various identities by
creating a universalist emperorship, premised upon both differentiat-
ing from and identifying with those over whom they ruled. One way in
which this occurred was drawing upon cultural practices such as col-
lecting and art cataloging in order to legitimate authority. The Qing
emperors were avid art collectors and as a result produced important

12
  For more examples of similar paintings, see Kathleen Ryor, “Nature Contained:
Penjing and Flower Arrangements as Surrogate Gardens in Ming China,” Orientations 33,
no. 3 (March 2002): 68–75. Also see catalogue entry, National Palace Museum, Qianlong
huangdi de wenhua daye/Emperor Ch’ien-lung’s Grand Cultural Enterprise (Taipei: National
Palace Museum, 2002), p. 85, II-8, for a Qing court example. For a discussion on Dutch still
life paintings as enabling a community of viewers in a changing society containing increas-
ingly more numerous material goods, see Elizabeth Honig, “Making Sense of Things,” RES:
Anthropology and Aesthetics 34 (Fall 1998): 166–168. She studies the paintings as a visual
discourse about material culture, and this article borrows this approach from that article.
She stresses the consideration of the broader cultural concern with objects in the world and
also the aesthetic reasons why such objects would find visual expression. See p. 168 n. 4 for
Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China
(London: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 51–52. This is most likely an outdated opinion.
13
  A myriad of scholarly works that rethink whether the last dynasty should simply be
classified as Chinese have been published in the last decade. For the most significant works
that detail the Qing dynasty as a diverse, frontier-expanding empire contending with vari-
ous powers on the Eurasian continent see Pamela Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History
and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Evelyn
Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1998); James Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and
Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998);
Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2005); and Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography
and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). A
good overview for teaching purposes that outlines the Qing imperial project as respond-
ing to global currents in world economic changes such as New World silver and demand
for Asian goods is Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese
History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); and Joanna Waley-Cohen, “Expansion and Colo-
nization in Early Modern Chinese History,” History Compass 2, no. 1 (January 2004): 1–6.
Huang: From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market 121

documentation on their art collections. Included among these docu-

mentations are paintings that date primarily to the heyday of Manchu
rule, typically understood to be the years spanning roughly the reigns of
the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors (1662–1795).
It is in this context that we should understand a well-known pair
of Yongzheng period (1723–1735) handscrolls titled Guwan tu (Scroll
of antiquities) dated to 1728 and 1729.14 They are two of the most
famous works dating to this high Qing period that reflect the collect-
ing practices of the imperial court. Painted with ink and colors on
paper by a painter of the Qing royal painting academy, the grandiose
Guwan tu scroll measures 52.5 centimeters high, approximately 135
centimeters wide, and more than 20 meters long.15 It is a scroll whose
graphic content comprises approximately 250 assorted antique objects
and can been read as a magnified pictorial record of actual objects that
constituted the Yongzheng imperial art collection, tout court. In sum,
the scroll includes a total of 103 ceramic objects whose dates range
from Song (960–1279) period Ru celadon wares, to Ming period blue-
and-white pieces, to Yongzheng-period famille rose-enameled porcelain
jars.16
Intensifying cataloguing efforts undertaken by Yongzheng’s succes-
sor, the Qianlong emperor, materialized in the form of ceramic-specific
catalogues. These illustrative works are extant, and four of them are
currently stored in the museum holdings of the Qing imperial archives
at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Now catalogued under
the general term taoci tu ce (ceramic manuals), they are a part of a
long lineage of illustrated catalogues that began primarily during the
Song dynasty, during which manuals and catalogues of bronze objects
emerged alongside the development of imperial art collections.17 The
most famous of these are the Kaogu tu (An Illustrated Book of Antiqui-
ties, 1092), and the Xuanhe bogu tulu (Xuanhe Album of Antiquities,

14
  This long handscroll is now held at the Percival David Foundation collection at the
British Museum. It dates to 1728. The scroll has a counterpart that dates to 1729 held in the
Victoria and Albert Museum, also in London, and can be considered a matching pair. On
this painting, see Shane McCausland, “The Emperor’s Old Toys: Rethinking the Yongzheng
Scroll of Antiquities,” Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society 66 (2000–2001): 65–74;
and Evelyn Rawski and Jessica Rawson, The Three Emperors, 1662–1795 (London: Royal
Academy of Arts, 2005), pp. 252–253, cat. 168.
15
  McCausland, “The Emperor’s Old Toys.”
16
  Ibid.
17
  Yu Peichin, “Pinjian zhi qu: Shiba shiji de taoci tuce jiqi xiangguan wenti” [Eigh-
teenth-Century Ceramic Manuals and Related Problems], Gugong xueshu jikan 22, no. 2
(Winter 2004): 133–166.
122 journal of world history, march 2012

1123). Dating primarily to the later Qianlong period of the 1780s and
early 1790s, the ceramic manuals are more elaborate and painstak-
ingly illustrated than the Guwan tu, revealing a keen engagement with
the art history of ceramics collections in the eighteenth-century Qing
court.18 Of all the Qing emperors, it was Qianlong’s cultural politics
that spurred to a fascinating degree the production of a new genre of
visual culture showcasing ceramics.
There are significant differences between the Yongzheng period
handscrolls and these ceramic catalogues of the late Qianlong period,
whose imperial policies and cultural ideology was a culmination of the
Manchu conquest set in motion in the seventeenth century.19 These
details are more fully explained elsewhere in my research; here, a brief
introduction of these ceramic manuals and their attendant painted
images will suffice. Existing museum holdings register four catalogues
that bear the imperial seal of the Qianlong emperor. Grouped into sets
of ten leaves, each of the four ceramic manuals are thread-bound and
document ten pieces of ceramic vessels on separate leaves. For each
ceramic vessel, a painting detailing its stylistic features appears on one
leaf, which is then followed by a corresponding textual passage describ-
ing the object’s measurements, and geographical kiln ware character-
istics are written on the opposite leaf.20 Painted in ink and color on
paper, these pictures were rendered in a highly realistic style, showing
the pieces in accurate perspectives and portraying their distinctive fea-
tures, including colors, crackles, and painted decorations.
Unlike the enormous handscolls Guwan tu (Scroll of Antiquities)
of the Yongzheng period, the ceramic catalogues exhibit the emperor’s
personal engagement with art objects, collections, and cataloguing.
Many of the textual descriptions that correspond with each ceramic
painting were written in Qianlong’s own hand. Their textual content
demonstrates Qianlong’s meticulous research into ceramic history;

18
  The four known manuals have the accession numbers guci 故瓷 #13898–13901 at
the National Palace Museum. They are called Jingtao yungu 精陶韞古, Fangong zhangse 燔
功彰色, Yanzhi liuguang 埏埴流光, and Taoci puce 陶瓷譜冊.
19
  The argument of the following three paragraphs about manuals, collecting cata-
logues, storage cabinets, and Qianlong’s universalist knowledge-making practices is exten-
sively explored in my research, Ellen Huang, “China’s China: Jingdezhen Porcelain and the
Production of Art” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2008); and in my forth-
coming article on material transformation and Qianlong’s imperial practices, “Jingdezhen
Porcelain: Producing China and China.”
20
  For black-and-white reproductions of these 1770s and 1780s ceramic catalogues
commissioned by Qianlong, see Yu, “Pinjian zhi qu,” pp. 133–166, especially Figs. 1–22.
Colored digital photo reproductions are in National Palace Museum, Grand View: Special
Exhibition on Ju Ware, pp. 170–173, plates 38–39.
Huang: From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market 123

many of the passages drew, or quoted, directly from Ming collectors’

connoisseurship manuals about the appreciation of arts and precious
objects. Examples included the early Ming text Gegu yaolun (Essen-
tial Criteria of Antiques) of 1488 and Gao Lian’s 1591 Zunsheng bajian
(Eight Discourses on Elegant Living).21 Qianlong’s reputation for
inserting his own imperial presence through marking paintings in the
most prominent of positions extended to his treatment of ceramics.
Not only did Qianlong write more than one hundred poems celebrat-
ing the stonewares and porcelain objects in his collection, he also had
inscribed—just as outrageously as his seals were inscribed on paint-
ings—some of his poems on certain choice Song ceramics of the court
collection.22 Whereas the handscrolls of the Yongzheng emperor were
devoid of kiln locations, ware typologies, dating authentications, and
the emperor’s own views, these ceramic catalogues are remnants of
Qianlong’s meticulous material and textual research. In essence, the
illustrated manuals provide a glimpse into the Qianlong emperor’s
intensifying impulse to systematically rank and inventory objects. Fur-
ther demonstrating Qianlong’s rationalizing tendency are four albums
recording bronze objects in the Qianlong collection dating to the same
years of the 1780s and 1790s. Mounted and decorated in the same fash-
ion, they follow the same graphic-text layout and are collected in the
National Palace Museum (Taiwan) holdings.
Many of these catalogued items are themselves extant today, dis-
seminated from the Qing imperial household to collections worldwide.
After careful research, curators have matched the paintings with spe-
cific objects thanks to the painters’ meticulous depictions. In other
words, the ten ceramic pieces pictured on a separate painting leaf in
each album originally corresponded to actual items kept in a single
curio box, known as duobao ge, cabinets of many treasures (Fig. 1). In
that each manual was most likely stored alongside, or on top of, the
treasure boxes, we can conclude that each manual was an illustrated
record of what was stored in a certain box or a certain container within
a single box.23 These preservation efforts are similar to the catalogues

21
  Gao Lian was an educated writer and dramatist from Hangzhou and was active in the
second half of the 1500s. His text belongs to the category of literature on material culture
analyzed in all of Craig Clunas’s scholarly work, Superfluous Things. Gao Lian’s Zunsheng
bajian (1591) contains no pictures or illustrations of the material objects at the center of
its discussions.
22
  See Hsieh Mingliang, “Qianlong de taoci jianshang guan” [Qianlong’s Connoisseur-
ship of Ceramics], Gugong xueshujikan 21, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 26.
23
  For more on the significance of duobao ge and the relationship between Qianlong’s
emperorship and artistic research and visual practices, see Huang, “China’s China,” chap. 3.
124 journal of world history, march 2012

Figure 1.  Cabinet of many treasures (duobao ge) containing twenty-three

curios, Qianlong period (1735–1796), jade, National Palace Museum. © 2011
License by Lee & Lee Communications Inc.

published by the modern museum’s curatorial practices and reflect

Qianlong’s ardent desire to identify and authenticate artworks in his
collection. Thus, the late eighteenth-century visual culture of ceramics
as embodied in these illustrated manuals is part and parcel of the his-
tory of an expanding Qing empire that had reached its widest territorial
Huang: From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market 125

reach under the reign of Qianlong. The manuals indicate the extreme
measures with which the Qianlong court treated art connoisseurship
and antiques management. Far more than reflecting a Qing emperor’s
playthings and leisure activity, such detailed artistic activities were just
one of the ways in which the Qing confronted challenges of rulership,
one that was continuously facing global pressures on the Eurasian con-
tinent of the eighteenth century.

Images of Porcelain Production and the Rise of Albums:

Orderly Viewing and Orderly Viewers of the Qing Court

The history of ceramics in visual images includes another category:

those that depict ceramic manufacture. The first visual representations
pertaining to porcelain production appeared in the woodblock prints
of the late Ming dynasty technology treatise Tiangong kaiwu (Heaven’s
Craft and the Creation of Things), published in 1637.24 In his chapter
on ceramic techniques, the author Song Yingxing (b. 1587) divided
the information contained therein into six sections discussing sepa-
rately the production of tiles, bricks, bottles and jars, white porcelain,
blue-and-white ware, and kilns. Corresponding to these subsections,
Tiangong kaiwu contained thirteen simple sketches printed by wood-
block carving technique. Each illustration portrayed people in the
midst of making different ceramic objects, including constructing jars,
loading the kiln, and molding clay (Fig. 2).
The layout and content of the pictures of the Tiangong kaiwu showed
no specific attention to the order of a production process. Instead, the
images were grouped together in a general ceramic technology chapter
called “Molding Ceramics” (Tao Shan). The first three themes depicted
woodblock pictures of specific objects: tiles, bricks, and water jugs. The
last six images are exclusively concerned with high-fired ceramics pro-
duced in Jiangxi province. These pictures do not specify a geographical

24
  This book was a late Ming dynasty encyclopedic work on the industrial and agri-
cultural technologies published by a Jiangxi province native. Portions of it survived in the
eighteenth-century great Qing encyclopedia, the Gujin tushu jicheng, and a hardcopy was
found in Japan by the late Qing dynasty intellectual and antiquarian Luo Zhenyu. In the
early twentieth century, the dating of the illustrations was at first unclear, but the publica-
tion in 1959 of reproductions of the Ming versions in Shanghai have helped clarify the issue
of what the Ming edition’s illustrations looked like. Song Yingxing, T’ien-kung k’ai-wu:
Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century, trans. E-tzu Zen Sun and Shiou-chuan Sun
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1966), pp. vii–xi. For the entire text, see
Song Yingxing, Tiangong kaiwu (3 juan), Xuxiu sikuquanshu, vol. 1115 (Shanghai: Shanghai
guji chubanshe, 2002), pp. 23–136.
126 journal of world history, march 2012

Figure 2.  Woodblock print of people making roof tiles, Tiangong kaiwu
(1637). Photo by author.

location of the scene presented, nor is there any graphic visualization

of a landscape background. As flat images, they are generally drawn
without perspective, much like the woodblock illustrations of farm-
ing devices in Nongshu (agricultural treatises) written and illustrated
in the first decades of the fourteenth century.25 Unlike the images in
Nongshu, however, the content of Tiangong kaiwu’s illustrations shows
people using tools to alter the natural world and produce things. The
illustrations are about the idea that technology involved a symbiotic
relationship between man and his natural environment. Reflective of
this, the pictorial composition centralizes on people using their skills to
harness the resources available in nature in a nondescript setting and
devotes no pictorial space for any other visual content.26

25
  Peter Golas’s argument that the original Ming dynasty Tiangong kaiwu illustrations
display a great degree of flatness is outlined in his article “Like Obtaining a Great Treasure,”
in Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China, ed. Francesca Bray and
Georges Metailie (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 576, 584–585.
26
  Golas, “Like Obtaining a Great Treasure,” p. 576.
Huang: From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market 127

While these images attracted international scientific attention in

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as technical illustrations, the
Qing emperors and, in particular, Qianlong were the major influences
on the emergence of a new classification of ceramic manufacture images
now referred to with the phrase Taoye tu. Just as Qianlong showed
great interest in the annotation of ceramic catalogues and the inscrib-
ing of ceramic pieces, Qing imperial policies under Qianlong were also
responsible for the production of the first painting albums portraying
porcelain production. These albums surpassed previous illustrations in
their thoroughness and detail specificity, initiating a type of orderly
viewing that cohered in the format of sequentially ordered albums in
the production of a universal viewing subject—the emperor.
There are, to date, three known sets of paintings that have Qing court
painting workshop origins and depict porcelain production through a
series of linked pictures. The most famous set of porcelain manufactur-
ing illustrations are now owned by a private collector in Taiwan.27 All
together, the set in Taiwan consists of twenty painted illustrations on
silk, each paired with a separate calligraphic annotation, making this
an album of text-image couplets. The set also includes two leaves on
which a brief introduction to the album’s content is inscribed. It was
written by Tang Ying (1672–1756), the inner court official imperially
appointed to oversee production of the Jingdezhen kilns between 1728
and 1756, and is titled “Tuci jilüe” (Summary of the Order of Illustra-
tions). The twenty illustrations were first painted and produced as a
set of paintings, and were expanded upon through the textual expla-
nations by Tang Ying. In 1743, following an order of the Qianlong
Emperor, Tang Ying traveled to Beijing from his post in Jingdezhen
and annotated a set of twenty paintings illustrating the manufacture
of porcelain.28 After he finished writing the calligraphic explanations

27
  The set of Taoye tu accompanied by Tang Ying’s text, variously called Taoye tu bian
ci or Taoye tushuo (1743), comprises twenty commentaries paired with accompanying illus-
trations. The paintings were originally kept in the Forbidden City and then left China,
resurfaced in Hong Kong in Christies in 1996, and are now in Taiwan in the hands of a
private collector. See Peter Lam, “Tang Ying (1682–1756): The Imperial Factory, Superin-
tendent at Jingdezhen,” Transactions of the Oriental Ceramics Society 63 (2000): 65–82. In
this article, the Tang Ying annotated set will be referred to as the original set—as it was the
first image-text album—though the exact order of production of these three imperial albums
cannot be ascertained at this time. The Tang Ying annotated set is completely reproduced
in Chang Foundation of Chinese Art, Chinese Art from the Ching Wan Society Collection
(Taipei: Chang Foundation, 1998).
28
  The Tang Ying memorial gives a good outline of the emperor’s commission. See
Xiong Liao and Xiong Wei, comps., Zhongguo taoci guji jicheng [Collected Documents on
Chinese Ceramics] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 2006), p. 108.
128 journal of world history, march 2012

accompanying the porcelain production paintings, he made sure that

the text and paintings were paired and arranged in a correct order, per
the emperor’s edict. Having fulfilled the tasks of annotation and for-
matting, Tang Ying presented the image-text painting album to the
Qianlong emperor (Fig. 3). The Tang Ying album was thus the first
complete series of image-text pairings that were explicitly referred to
as Taoye tu in historical documentation. Scholars have located another
set, albeit incomplete, of such production paintings, now stored in the
collection of the Palace Museum in Beijing. In this set, only eight album
leaves remain, with each depicting a step in the porcelain production
process in color and ink on silk.29 A third album of paintings rendered
in the court workshop style is in a private French collector’s holdings.
This set consists of thirty leaves.30 It bears the mark of Jiao Bingzhen,
a painter for the court of emperor Kangxi and active in the Kangxi (r.
1661–1722) and early Yongzheng (r. 1722–1735) reign periods. Since
the years of Jiao Bingzhen’s painting career at the Qing court ranged
from the late 1680s through 1722, it is possible that the earliest sets of
Taoye tu visual images were already in existence at the Qing court in
the early 1720s.
It is clear that the production of such albums stemmed from a
vested imperial interest in the manufacturing of goods that enabled a
tax base for the empire. All three emperors of the high Qing period—
Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong—commissioned the reproduction
and poetic recomposition for a painting album portraying farming and
textile work, Gengzhi tu (Pictures of Tilling and Weaving). First painted
between 1132 and 1134 by a provincial official stationed in the lower
reaches of the Yangtze River valley, the original Gengzhi tu paintings
consisted of two sets of twenty-four paintings cataloguing scenes from
the occupations assigned by Confucian ideology to men and women
of rice farming and sericulture, respectively.31 In 1153 they were pre-
sented to the first Southern Song emperor Gaozong (r. 1127–1163)
with the purpose of celebrating the advanced farming and textile tech-

29
  The eight leaves of the incomplete court painting album are reproduced in Gugong
bowuyuan, ed., Qing shi tudian: Qing chao tongshi tulu, Yongzheng chao [Qing Dynasty Cata-
logue, Yongzheng Reign] (Beijing: Zijincheng, 2002), pp. 149–157.
30
  Only one leaf of the thirty-leaf painting album has been published, in Michel Beur-
deley and Guy Raindre, Qing Porcelain, Famille Verte, Famille Rose (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1987), p. 33, Fig. 26.
31
  Lou Shou (1190–1162) was a native of Zhejiang province who at the time was an
official stationed in Jiangnan, the center of the country’s most advanced rice farming tech-
niques in the twelfth century. Each of the forty-eight scenes was inscribed with a poem writ-
ten by said official. See Francesca Bray, “Agricultural Illustrations,” in Bray and Metailie,
eds., Graphics and Text, pp. 519–552.
Huang: From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market 129

Figure 3.  Two image-text pairings from the album commissioned by Qian-
long in 1743. After Chinese Art from the Ching Wan Society (Taipei: Chang
Foundation of Art, 1998).

niques operating in the Jiangnan region that were vital to the central
state’s responsibility to maintain social harmony and political order.
As pictures portraying people laboring within the proper gendered
spheres of male and female work, these paintings seem to be a logical
extension of Confucian gender propaganda that dominated political
culture since the Song dynasty. Kangxi ordered not only the drawing
of the Gengzhi tu paintings (rendered by the aforementioned Jiao Bing-
zhen court painter) in 1696 but also followed his order with an edict to
engrave, print, and distribute woodblock printed versions of the 1696
130 journal of world history, march 2012

Gengzhi tu among regional officials across the empire. Qianlong’s com-

missioning for the Tang Ying annotated set about ceramic manufacture
thus followed an imperial precedent set by his grandfather Kangxi and
his predecessor, Yongzheng. As one scholar has noted, the Gengzhi tu
compositions of the Qing court failed to depict the technical improve-
ments in farming practice that occurred between the Song and Qing
periods. This lack of attention to technical detail may indicate that
Qing emperors favored symbolic over material instrumentality of these
albums.32 Given the Qing emperors’ penchant for southern tours and
visual pageantry in the construction of imperial legitimacy, these pic-
tures may indeed have had symbolic purposes and functions, whether
as “timeless representations of idealized order,” or as visual broadcasts of
imperial power over regional lands. Some of the paintings in the album
were spatially and compositionally composed in the landscape style,
after all. However, any scholarly interpretation of the Taoye tu (1743)
album that assumes a binary relationship between material (technical)
and immaterial (symbolic) does not explain the surge of imperial inter-
est in such sequentially viewed albums during the Qing dynasty. In fact,
during the Qing period, the types of technologies depicted in painting
albums multiplied, expanding beyond the subject matters of rice agri-
culture and silk cultivation. Of the Qing emperors, Qianlong’s invest-
ment in paintings portraying material production processes was par-
ticularly acute and distinctively more purposeful than his predecessors.
In addition to the Gengzhi tu on tilling and weaving and the Taoye tu
(1743) on porcelain production, Qianlong ordered the painting of the
Mianhua tu, or Pictures of Cotton Production, in 1765. All three sets of
paintings followed the album illustration format, finding coherence as
an ordered set of visual illustrations. Thus, it was during the Qianlong
period that the genre of sequentially viewed albums experienced an
intensification of court patronage. Qianlong’s enthusiasm for these sets
may be deduced from what we know of the emperor’s ruling strategies
already: He was an assiduous scholar whose research included material
antiquities and philological investigations. The ceramic manuals dis-
cussed above affirm this scholarly side of Qianlong. Like Kangxi, Qian-
long’s grandfather, he practiced poetry in the mode of the Confucian

32
  Bray, “Agricultural Illustrations.” On the history of Qianlong’s imperial touring, see
Michael G. Chang, A Court on Horseback: Imperial Touring and the Construction of Qing
Rule, 1680–1785 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). For representations
of landscape as an imperial visual project, see James A. Millward et al., eds., New Qing Impe-
rial History: The Making of the Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (New York: Routledge
Curzon, 2004).
Huang: From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market 131

classical traditions.33 Selectively adopting Confucian literary traditions

and ideology was part of an imperial strategy that enabled Qianlong to
negotiate his Manchu background with the culture of the majority of
bureaucratic elites over whom he ruled.
Yet, two characteristics distinguish the Qianlong commissioned
album of 1743 from earlier portrayals of ceramics in the Tiangong
kaiwu and in earlier albums, such as the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving.
First, the Taoye tu (1743) album annotated by Tang Ying for Qian-
long surpassed the illustrations of Tiangong kaiwu in terms of illustra-
tive specificity. A second and related characteristic is the sequentially
determined order in which the album proceeds from one leaf to the
next. Tang Ying’s memorial attests to both these characteristics: it
expressed the emperor’s desire for technological detail, place names,
and sequentially ordered visual pictures. According to Tang Ying’s
memorial to the throne, the emperor’s edict instructed that Tang Ying
write annotations regarding the technique and affairs of pottery pro-
duction (jiye). The emperor even stipulated that the words be written
in an elegant manner and in parallel structure form, permitting a lee-
way of ten or so words.34 The emperor furthermore specified that Tang
Ying should chronicle the names of the places around the Jingdezhen
environs where raw materials such as porcelain clay (gaoling tu), stone
(baidunzi), and water could be found. Finally, the edict dictated that
Tang Ying should order the paintings and explanations in a correct
sequence before presenting the paintings to the Qianlong emperor.35
At this point, one can imagine Tang Ying writing the calligraphy with
the explanatory texts and ordering the album leaves before giving them
to Qianlong. The edict refers to this album with the term Taoye tu,
from which the pictorial genre’s title is derived.
Thus, the final form of the painting album’s three main princi-
ples—rigid poetic structure, minutiae about production, and chrono-
logical order—lent to the seriality of the album by splicing, ordering,

33
  For a court painting of the Emperor Kangxi practicing classical poetry and calligra-
phy in his study, see the painting in Rawski and Rawson, China: The Three Emperors, cat.
120, which is now stored in the Palace Museum, Beijing. For examples of portraits painted
by court paintings portraying Qianlong as a classical scholar, see Rawski and Rawson, China:
The Three Emperors for the reproduction of Hongli Practicing Calligraphy on a Banana Leaf,
held in the Palace Museum, Beijing, and, also at the Palace Museum in Beijing, the painting
of Qianlong in his study by Guiseppe Castiglione (1688–1766) in Chiumei Ho, Splendors
of China’s Forbidden City: The Glorious Reign of Emperor Qianlong Field Museum of Chicago
(New York: Merrell, 2004), p. 200, Fig. 278.
34
  See Tang Ying memorial in Xiong and Xiong, Zhongguo taoci guji jicheng, p. 108.
35
  See Xiong and Xiong, Zhongguo taoci guji jicheng, p. 109.
132 journal of world history, march 2012

and directing the temporal flow of the pictures. Unlike the mid sev-
enteenth-century woodblock-printed images of the Tiangong kaiwu, in
which the graphics were self-contained, stand-alone images and devoid
of temporal aspects, Qianlong’s Taoye tu (1743) album about porcelain
production were purposefully arranged into an order. The process of
making a ceramic pot was anything but linear in Jingdezhen during
the eighteenth century, especially at a production center like the Jing-
dezhen kilns, where thousands of specialists worked simultaneously.36
Still, the poetic rhythm, painted but abstract steps, and imperial desire
for a viewing order fulfilled the album’s requisites and structured the
porcelain manufacturing process in an even-paced temporal direction.
One more contrast between the imperially commissioned album
and the illustrations from the Tiangong kaiwu should be mentioned. The
two produce very different visual experiences from the point of nature
of viewing, or image-viewer relations. Viewing the series of actions and
techniques as steps distances the viewer from the object being viewed:
the process. Since the entire set of paintings portrayed a sequential
action spanning scenes painted over twenty leaves, the viewing experi-
ence not only captured one’s attention, fixing the viewer to a certain
position outside the object, it also enabled the viewer to observe the
flow of time. In this sense, the 1743 porcelain production album of the
Qianlong court was an instrumental tool for the creation of a viewing
subject who stood outside of time while being able to observe and know
temporal flow.
Taken together, Qianlong’s ceramic manuals and the 1743 Taoye
tu album of ceramic manufacture certify the longest reigning Qing
emperor of the eighteenth century as a ruler who used material forms
and symbolic power to instantiate empire. He showed himself to be
intellectually aware of ceramic history and of creating visual represen-
tations of power and control. He was just as interested, however, in the
materiality of ceramic production as a temporal linear transformation.
As I make the point elsewhere, ceramic is a material formed through a

36
  From the perspective of a studio potter or critic writing in the present, the ceramic
creation process may be understood as linear, where one distinct step follows another. That
potters in Jingdezhen necessarily shared the same experience is questionable. The distinc-
tion between conceptualizing time as primarily divisible into a knowable past and present
and other forms of time such as recurring time, cyclical time, or mythical time is analyzed
clearly in Stefan Tanaka’s New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2004), pp. 27–53. A recent essay on other examples wherein illustrative pictures’
formats are analyzed in terms of temporality of seeing is Jennifer Purtle, “Scopic Frames:
Devices for Seeing China, c. 1640,” Art History 33, no. 1 (February 2010): 54–73.
Huang: From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market 133

process of permanent transformation.37 Indeed, the painted images of

the Qing court must be understood beyond a framework that posits the
symbolic from the material as polarized opposites. In fact, the album
institutes a certain way of viewing ceramic materiality that in turn
shapes the viewer him- or herself. Perhaps it is the temporal sense, as
experienced through a particular type of viewing of a sequential album
format, that drew the Qianlong emperor to favor such an art form.
Insofar as Qianlong’s construction of a Qing-Manchu imperial power
included an ambitious concern for detail, systemization, and universal
knowledge, sequential images of the 1743 Taoye tu album did far more
than the Tiangong kaiwu prints to construct an all-knowing and omni-
scient imperial identity.38

Rhapsody on a Theme of Taoye tu:

Creating a Global Visual Culture

While Qianlong commissioned the Taoye tu album of 1743 to serve

imperial intentions, the paintings had an afterlife that circulated far
beyond the walls of the court palaces and the scope of the emperor’s
original purposes. In fact, during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, the pictorial motif of porcelain production traveled on trajec-
tories of global scale. At least thirty-five sets of ink-on-paper drawings
or ink-on-silk paintings depicting the motif of porcelain production
that date to the second quarter of the eighteenth century and onward
exist.39 Depicted over a series of linked pictures and created with spe-
cific sequential order, these illustrative sets enjoyed widespread inter-
national appeal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through
channels of export, domestic trade, Qing imperial patronage, and—
from the mid nineteenth century and onward—translation efforts
driven by industrializing state factories and scientific communities in
Japan and Europe. By the close of the nineteenth century, the motif
found visual form not only on two-dimensional media but also as deco-
rative motifs on porcelain objects themselves.
As mentioned, by 1743 there were already three albums portraying
porcelain production with Qing court origins. Yet, the existing schol-

37
  Huang, “Jingdezhen Porcelain: Producing China and China.”
38
  See the introduction to Crossley’s Translucent Mirror for an overview of her argument
about history, time, and imperial identity during Qianlong’s reign.
39
  For a list, refer to the appendix in Huang, “China’s China,” p. 255.
134 journal of world history, march 2012

arly literature on such images in the English language has hitherto

focused purely on the subgenre of paintings known as export sets. These
sets were primarily watercolor paintings or drawings of ink on Chinese
pith paper exported via the port of Canton (present-day Guangzhou)
for consumers in England, France, or the United States.40 Oftentimes,
the images were plastered as wallpapers in the domestic spaces of Eng-
lish or French families.41 Scholars have characterized export sets by
their idealized, idyllic settings in which diligent Chinese workers craft
objects of high foreign demand such as chinaware or tea. For instance,
Figure 4 is one painting from an export set. It depicts the preparation of
raw clay by pounding to make porcelain body materials and is currently
held in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Given the social changes
affecting the lives of the residents of England, France, and the United
States as a result of the Industrial Revolution, these scenes, as schol-
ars conclude, fulfilled the fantasies for a peaceful industrial production
process.42 While such imaginations of a fictive “Orient” may indeed
have displaced anxieties for English workers living in Britain, such
an analytical approach privileges the Euro-American reception as the
only historical narrative and relegates such watercolor paintings to the
underexplored arena of export art. Moreover, it attributes the porcelain
production motif to foreign tastes and foreign demand as the singular
cause behind their global circulation in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. In other words, export art is dismissed as unauthentic, non-
Chinese art history. Remaining in historical obscurity, export belongs
to the realm outside the national framework. The resultant dismissal of
export sets as nothing more than foreign demand objects reinforces a
sharp distinction between Chinese aesthetic norms and Western tastes.
Most important to note is that it elides their history of transmission
and cross-boundary exchange as global art objects.
The production of these production albums cannot be attributed

40
  For the English-language literature on this subject, see Craig Clunas, Chinese Export
Watercolours (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1984); Carl L. Crossman, Decorative
Arts of the Chine Trade: Paintings, Furnishings and Exotic Curiosities (Woodbridge, Suffolk:
Antique Collectors’ Club, 1991); and Victoria and Albert Museum and Guangzhou Cul-
tural Bureau, eds., Souvenir from Canton—Chinese Export Paintings from the Victoria and
Albert Museum (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2003). The latter has a reproduction
of many of such sets. For a recent study in Chinese language see Jiang Yinghe, Qingdai
yanghua yu Guangzhou kouan [Western Painting and Canton Port during the Qing Period]
(Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006).
41
  I thank curator Hongxin Zhang of the Victoria and Albert Museum for drawing my
attention to this feature of the export sets during a viewing session in 2008.
42
  Craig Clunas makes this point in his short overview (see Chinese Export Water­
colours).
Huang: From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market 135

Figure 4.  Painting from watercolor album for export, watercolors on paper,
1770–1790. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

categorically to foreign taste, especially in light of the chronological

order of appearance of these narrative illustrations. According to a
study of a watercolor album held in Sweden, the earliest known export
album dates to the late 1730s or early 1740s, making the earliest export
album to have appeared either as the Qing imperial albums’ contem-
porary or antecedent.43 Tang Ying’s memorial dating to the eighth year
of Qianlong (1743) and Imperial Household Workshop record (Yangx-
indian zaobanchu qingdang) of the third year of Qianlong (1738) dem-
onstrate the existence of possibly two court Taoye tu albums already
extant by 1738.44 The set currently in a French private collection bears
the painter’s seal of Jiao Bingzhen, who happened to have been the first
Qing court painter to paint architectural images influenced by perspec-

43
  E. Belfrage, “Chinese Watercolours from the 18th Century Illustrating Porcelain
Manufacture,” in International Association of Bibliophiles XVth Congress, Copenhagen, 20–26
September 1987: Transactions (Copenhagen: Danish National Library of Science and Medi-
cine, 1992).
44
  See Qianlong, third year, Yangxindian neiwufu huojidang (Imperial Household
Workshop Archives) quoted in Yu Peichin, “Bieyou xinyi yi Qianlong guanyao de cuangxin
wei li” [Innovations as Seen through the Qianlong Imperial Kilns], in Qianlong huangdi de
wenhua daye/Emperor Ch’ien-lung’s Grand Cultural Enterprise, p. 285 n. 51.
136 journal of world history, march 2012

tive drawing introduced by the Jesuits priest-painters at the early Qing

court.45 Thus, even the early eighteenth-century Qing court albums
show a history riddled with exchange and interaction between China
and Europe. To dismiss or analyze these as quintessentially foreign or
“Chinese” ignores this cross-cultural history of network and exchange.
Furthermore, the vested interest held by Qianlong in Jing­dezhen pro-
duction as demonstrated by his commissioning of the Taoye tu image-
text album indicate a history of production images that cannot be
reduced to romanticized images of the Orient produced in the con-
text of the West’s Industrial Revolution. In fact, the Qing court Taoye
tu paintings were equally as unreal in their depiction of depopulated
groves and spacious artisan workshops. They adopted Western perspec-
tive in drawing technique in some scenes, while other leaves exhib-
ited shifting perspective drawing techniques that were exemplary of
landscape painting methods. Ultimately, the social life of these images
further illuminates the international circulation of visual images of
porcelain. Rather than dwelling on essential cultural or national differ-
ences, their history makes it possible to speak of a global community of
viewers in the early eighteenth century.
The global audience encompassed not only the worlds of Man-
chu emperors, British middle-class collectors, and French aristocrats
but also sectors of society less visible than national or imperial lead-
ers, including local Jingdezhen artisans and European scientists. After
the early nineteenth century, images of ceramic manufacture circulated
with increasing frequency and under less innocuous circumstances.
With the growth of industrial manufacture, the decline of the Qing
state, and the battle for market share in porcelain, the reproduction of
illustrative sets of ceramic production was implicated in international
colonial clashes between the Qing and other nationalizing states. After
Tang Ying completed the task of annotating the original Taoye tu paint-
ings in 1743, the image-text pairings separated and found disparate
paths of circulation. With regard to nineteenth-century visual images
of porcelain production, Tang Ying’s explanations formed a defining
moment in the propelling of their afterlife. As the twenty paintings
constituting the set were products of a direct imperial edict, the paint-
ings themselves remained in storage in the imperial household. The
paintings were therefore hidden from view from people outside the
court. However, Tang Ying’s textual explanations had a journey that

45
  For a brief mention of this painter, see Anita Chung, Drawing Boundaries: Architec-
tural Images in Qing China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004).
Huang: From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market 137

reached readers outside of the Qing capital. Between 1773 and 1783,
the 1743 text—which included such details as place names of raw
materials, dimensions of porcelain bodies, and pigment names—once
under the sole ownership of the imperial court in Beijing, had been
compiled and printed in a ceramic treatise published and written in the
Jiangnan region located in the Yangtze River valley of the southeastern
parts of Qing China.46
Following this journey to the southern provinces of China, the far-
ranging textual explanations provided the impetus for the creation and
penning of the nineteenth-century manual about Jingdezhen porce-
lain titled Jingdezhen taolu (Records of Jingdezhen Ceramics). Origi-
nally published in 1815, the Jingdezhen taolu was the first specialized
book in the Chinese language that focused on Jingdezhen porcelain. It
was published by a private family publisher in Jingdezhen. After Tang
Ying’s annotations had been compiled and printed in the gazetteer of
Jiangxi province, a local resident of Jingdezhen must have read the text
reprinted in another forum and edited Tang Ying’s annotations. Feeling
that all existing books were not adequate, the author Zheng Tinggui
completed a new text about ceramic production on the basis that he
was native to Jingdezhen and had eyewitness experience of the process
at the kilns. His work was published as the Records of Jingdezhen Ceram-
ics in ten chapters, with the first chapter consisting of Zheng’s textual
revisions of Tang Ying’s imperially commissioned annotations. Like
the imperial album, the first chapter was paired with new illustrations
printed by woodblock carvings, engraved in Jingdezhen by Zheng’s
relative or acquaintance named Zheng Xiu. They too were text-image
pairings that followed in sequential order. Thus, the emergence of the
book’s text and illustrations derived from a local Jingdezhen resident’s
reconfiguration of the imperial commissioner Tang Ying’s words that
had first been paired with court paintings.
This manual had a prolific publication history and was translated
into foreign languages throughout the nineteenth century. It became
the basis of the South Kensington Museum’s handbook on Chinese Art

46
  In 1774, the explanations found their way into the writings of Zhu Yan’s monograph
on ceramics history, Tao Shuo. Zhu Yan, Tao Shuo (n.p.: Xue Zhaohuang, 1782). Apparently,
Tang Ying’s annotations not only circulated among provincial and court level officials but
also fell into the hands of English doctor Stephen Bushell, who translated Zhu Yan’s Tao
Shuo. Completed in 1891 but published in 1910 in London, Bushell’s translation, titled
­Chinese Pottery and Porcelain, rendered Tang Ying’s explanations into English for an audi-
ence of museum specialists, private collectors, and twentieth-century scholars of Chinese
art.
138 journal of world history, march 2012

by the early twentieth century, written by Dr. Stephen Bushell. The

French version appeared as L’histoire de la porcelaine chinoise in 1856
for research use by Sèvres chemists in the improvement of the Sèvres
Imperial Porcelain Factory just outside of Paris.47 In 1907, a Japa­nese
language version, titled Keitokuchin to roku, was published and spon-
sored by the new Tokyo Museum.48 In both instances, not only were
the texts translated, but so were the visual images (Fig. 5). The series
of woodblock prints making up the first chapter were recarved, recom-
posed, and reprinted in their new published form. The circulation of
this all-important canonical manual of porcelain production was hardly
an innocent flow of artistic and technological exchange, however. The
facts that the French version was translated at the height of the Opium
Wars and that the late Meiji Japanese version appeared in Japan after
the Sino-Japanese war, during which Qing territory was ceded to the
Meiji imperial government, are reflective of the role of global power
relations of the latter half of the nineteenth century in the shift from
Jingdezhen porcelain to “la porcelaine chinoise,” to borrow the phras-
ing from the French title.
By nature of its nineteenth-century translation history, the Records
of Jingdezhen Ceramics (1815) left a lasting impression on ceramic
researchers about imperial kilns in the West. As Margaret Medley has
pointed out, the very concept of “imperial kilns” in Western-language
studies on ceramics can be traced to the publication of Records of Jing-
dezhen Ceramics in Western European languages.49 Crucially, this trans-
formation of meaning about a local product, Jingdezhen porcelain, as an
imperially produced object occurred through the translation of words
and images. The publication of the canonical work on Jingdezhen por-
celain in the world of the nineteenth century was therefore a negotia-
tion between image and word, and a site of contestation between impe-
rial centers and local production of knowledge. Elsewhere, I show how
the author and compiler of the Records of Jingdezhen Ceramics aimed to
convey porcelain as a locally produced Jingdezhen product in order to
celebrate the relationship between the imperial kilns and Jingdezhen

47
  Stanislas Julien, Histoire et fabrication de la porcelaine chinoise (Paris: Mallet-Bachelier,
1856).
48
  Fujie Nagataka, Keitokuchin tōroku [Records of Jingdezhen Ceramics] (Tokyo: Hoso-
kawa Kaiekido, 1907). A copy is at the National Library in Tokyo, and a microfilm copy is
at the Cambridge University Library.
49
  Margaret Medley, “Ching-te Chen and the Problem of the Imperial Kilns,” Bulletin
of the School of Oriental and African Studies 29, no. 2 (1955): 326–338. Medley wrote that it
was not “until Julien’s French translation [of Jingdezhen taolu]” that those in the west became
privy to the notion of imperial kilns (p. 326).
Huang: From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market 139

Figure 5.  Cover page and plate from French translation, Histoire et Fabrica-
tion de la Porcelaine Chinoise (1856). Photo by author.

porcelain. He did this specifically in the context of weakening court

investment in Jingdezhen. Zheng Tinggui accomplished this through
the manipulation of visual images in the first chapter of his book. The
Qianlong imperially commissioned album begins immediately with the
technical process: the twenty paintings start with a painting portraying
clay collection and end with a leaf about the celebration of successful
porcelain production. By contrast, the Records of Jingdezhen Ceram-
ics contained images that were more geographically specific. The first
two woodblock prints were not pictures of the technical process. In
Records, the first two pictures are a map of Jingdezhen city and a map
of the imperial kiln complex. Only with the third printed illustration
does the sequence begin, with an illustration of clay collection (Fig.
6). Thus, Zheng’s configuration of the graphics brings to the fore Jing-
dezhen as the site of porcelain production and the imperial kiln depot
(yu yao chang).
Figure 6.  “Imperial Kilns” (yuyao chang), second illustration from Jingdezhen Tao lu, 1891 ed. Photo by author.
Huang: From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market 141

Ironically, while the book and images therein were redrawn and
edited to emphasize Jingdezhen’s integral role in the production of such
treasured objects, the transmission and translations of the Records of
Jingdezhen Ceramics’ visual project resulted ultimately in the globally
disseminated knowledge of imperial kilns, as noted. Sadly, the fasci-
nation with “Chinese imperial kilns” in Europe occurred just as the
Qing empire was falling prey to the nationalizing porcelain industries
in the era of nation-state formation and overseas colonial intrusions.
Even within the borders of the waning Qing empire itself, the impact
of the book was a recurrence of visual forms celebrating the impe-
rial kilns and de-emphasizing the Jingdezhen side in the nineteenth
century. An understudied album of paintings with fourteen leaves of
Jingdezhen porcelain manufacturing paintings called Jingdezhen taotuji
(Illustrated Record of Jingdezhen Ceramics) painted after 1820 is one
such example.50
This album consists of fourteen leaves, the first being a textual pref-
ace whose author is unknown. The second leaf in the album is a paint-
ing of the imperial kiln complex, denoted by the waving banner flap-
ping with the words yuyao chang (imperial kiln complex). The twelve
pictorial leaves that follow depict scenes of the process of Jingdezhen
porcelain production. The preface’s textual content diverges from
Tang Ying’s “Tuci jilüe,” written for the Qianlong set. Both emphasize
the importance of portraying each step in the technical process: after
detailing the steps and places whereby materials were to be harvested
and porcelain would be created, the writer of the preface of the early
nineteenth-century album states that the “[pictures] cannot skip any
step or leave out any labor” (deng bu ke lie, gong bu ke que). Whereas
Tang Ying begins his narrative by locating the genealogy of cultivating
porcelain (taoye) with the Three Dynasties reign of Emperor Shun, the
Jingdezhen taotuji album begins its narrative with a description of the
physical distance between the Jingdezhen township from the Raozhou
prefecture. After specifying the geographical location of Jingdezhen,
the preface narrates the history of the imperial kiln administration
beginning with the second year of the Ming dynasty’s first emperor,
Hongwu. It then begins to discuss the shift from the Ming system of
eunuchs who oversaw imperial kiln production to the resident kiln
supervisor sent from the Imperial Household and concludes with the

50
  The dating to the second quarter of the nineteenth century (Jiaqing reign) is
explained in Tan Danjiong, “Taoye tongshi” [General Summary on Taoye], Gugong jikan 5,
no. 1 (1970): 17–41. The article compares the paintings’ depiction of porcelain production
to field work on ceramic production conducted in Sichuan before the 1970s.
142 journal of world history, march 2012

transfer of administrative duties to the Jiujiang customs office. Clearly,

the nineteenth-century album took as its departure point the chang-
ing relationship between Jingdezhen and the imperial court, centered
specifically on Jingdezhen as the site of the imperial kilns.
Porcelain production motifs eventually came to decorate porcelain
objects produced at various kilns across China, ensuing in a continu-
ous cycle of recursivity and indexicality. Again, the graphic idea of
an imperial kiln center as the site of porcelain production prevailed
on decorative surfaces. For instance, both the Beijing Palace Museum
and the Shanxi Museum have in their collection a dual set of famille
rose porcelain vases portraying the production process at the Jingde-
zhen imperial kilns. The collection at the Beijing Capital Museum
also includes a large blue-and-white porcelain plate produced during
the Guangxu period (1871–1908) that depicts porcelain production at
the Jingdezhen imperial kilns.51 Both of these porcelain objects show
remarkable resemblance to the first leaf of the Jingdezhen taotuji album
in content. All three works share an iconographical element, that of
the flag waving the Chinese characters yuyao chang. The media itself
is now porcelain and not a set of sequentially ordered illustrations, yet
they signify the lasting influence of the first album, Taoye tu of 1743.
While originally produced for a universal emperor, the later itera-
tions as export sets, woodblock prints, and foreign translations suggest
a global network of connections rather than visual subgenres usually
studied in isolation. This roundabout history of circulation cannot be
reduced to a unidirectional narrative of Western influence driven by
export tastes or even a top-down history of emperor-driven produc-
tion. The canonical manual published in 1815, the Records of Jingde-
zhen Ceramics, shows the significant role local artisans’ sketches and
revisions had in picturing and shaping knowledge about porcelain at
home and abroad.

Toward a Conclusion

The overarching aim in this article has been to highlight the histori-
cal conditions in which the ceramic production visual genre emerged.

51
  Wang Guangyao, Zhongguo gudai guanyao zhidu [Administration of the Imperial Kilns
in China] (Beijing: Zijincheng, 2004), pp. 159–160, fig. 69; Li Yong, “Cong Qing Jiaqing
fencai yaogong zhici tu ping kan Jingdezhen zhici gongyi” [Understanding Jingdezhen Por-
celain Production Technique from Examining Production Images on Qing Jiaqing Vases],
Wenwu jikan 1 (1999): 92–95.
Huang: From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market 143

It emphasizes the historical order in which individual sets of Taoye tu

images were created, including various subgenres of porcelain produc-
tion illustration—imperial painting albums, export, locally produced
woodblock prints, and foreign translations. Examining their individual
contexts of production and juxtaposing the subgenres with each other
demonstrate the history of exchange and influence between disparate
people and media in the creation of different Taoye tu production
images. The reach of such images spanned the imperial court to the
southern coastal and inland areas of Jiangnan and Jiangxi province,
and to Europe and Japan. During the two major centuries over which
empires gave way to nation-states across the world, there existed a
community of global viewers with a keen interest in porcelain and its
making. Audiences from China to Europe and Japan occupying differ-
ent strata of society shared a viewing practice that was process-oriented
and linear.
Craig Clunas has studied the formation of a “discourse on things”
through his investigation of late Ming connoisseurship texts. He makes
the point that the rise of texts and the discourse on hierarchies of tastes
reflected the commodification of books and visual knowledge among
elite literati in early modern China.52 He further concludes that a dis-
course on things and taste reflected the elite’s anxiety over blurring
status distinctions in a Ming society driven by active consumption.
As in Pierre Bourdieu’s study of the social stratification of aesthetic
taste, for Clunas, the commodification of knowledge in the form of
such books thus provided a way for the elite to maintain status distinc-
tions.53 The analysis in this article reveals a migration and transmission
of texts and images that also seem to demonstrate an increasing interest
in knowledge about porcelain in the latter half of the eighteenth and
the nineteenth century. But instead of emphasizing my analysis on the
causes for such exchanges in a purely economic sense, I draw attention
to the intricacies of historical relationships (sometimes exploitative)—
including origin, media, and order—by which information about Jing-
dezhen porcelain production appeared.
The past few decades have produced new historical scholarship
about China’s imperial past that stresses its global nature over its iso-
lationist tendencies, an idea cogently put forth by the historiography

52
  Clunas, Superfluous Things and Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (Prince­
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 15.
53
  Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard
Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
144 journal of world history, march 2012

influenced by the eminent historian John K. Fairbank’s idea of a Sino-

centric world order.54 Links have been found in Qing management of
territory to the Qing empire’s connection to the Inner Asian conti-
nent, to the influx of New World silver, and to Qing reception of sci-
ence, technology, and astronomy.55 As a result, consumption as a social
and economic phenomenon belongs not solely to Europe, but to China
as well.56 Most recently, historian Robert Finlay has rightly asserted
porcelain’s longue durée history as significant to shaping a global cul-
ture. The exchange of decorative designs and mutual influence often
rendered indistinguishable set roles of producer and consumer, creat-
ing a global culture. Along these same themes, the circuitous routes
on which visual images of production traveled reinforce the view that
“china” (porcelain) effected a global culture. Specific to the pictorial
themes discussed in this article, production as a visual theme was con-
sumed as a product in itself, and the mode of viewing, a historically
constructed visuality about porcelain production, was what gained
global purchase.
Knowledge about the kilns at Jingdezhen was commissioned to
serve imperial needs, but the scope of this knowledge exceeded the
emperor’s intention and official contexts. Qianlong did in fact com-
mission some paintings and retained them exclusively for court use.
The textual commentaries written in 1743 by the imperial kiln offi-
cial Tang Ying that were supposed to accompany the original paintings
eventually circulated outside the court, and they in turn spawned new
images and the new commentaries, not the least of which was the first
chapter of the Jingdezhen taolu. In other words, whereas the first set
of images conceived the texts, the adapted texts conceived images in
another context. The resulting copies and editions of the manual were
then used as the collector’s standard by which to know, enjoy, and buy
porcelain in the international art market of the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries.
The fact that much visual knowledge about porcelain production
originated in the Qing court suggests the limitations of attributing such
images and texts only to the growing market for porcelain in Europe or
America. Moreover, the process I have delineated points to the non-

54
  John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty
Ports, 1842–1854 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1953).
55
  Millward, Beyond the Pass; Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing.
56
  Craig Clunas, “Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the
West,” American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (December 1999): 1497–1511.
Huang: From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market 145

fixity of meanings of porcelain in ways that cannot be reduced simply

to the mechanics of the art market or technological developments. The
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century proliferation of ideas and images
of porcelain production show the ways in which knowledge formation
itself was the product of interactions among various classes of society.
By mapping the flow of these images, it is possible to see an intercon-
nected history of circulating knowledge about Jingdezhen manufac-
turing processes linking export audiences, Jingdezhen residents, court
painters, and Qing emperors. Ultimately, in its varying contexts, Jing-
dezhen porcelain seemed to escape definition, variously representing
imperial use, local technique, or idealized Chinese object created by
means of mass production. Its potency and staying power as a cultural
icon might actually be a product of its diverse history of interchange
and its ability to defy definitive categories such as image/text, West/
China, material/symbolic, and local/imperial center.