Page 118 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 3 Enamelled Porcelain Consumption in Eighteenth-century China

general for our understanding of how exactly porcelain was used in society, and how

porcelain was channelled.

3.3. Methodology and Resources

The primary sources consulted here include the archives of the Imperial Workshops

10
Archives and local gazetteers. Further Chinese reference works consulted here
include contemporary literary notes, which include short texts and scattered notes on

porcelain. Nevertheless, these works were usually compiled by famous contemporary

literati who collected luxury decorative arts themselves; their observations are crucial

for the study of porcelain consumption. Apart from textual records, this chapter will

also give attention to the visual materials of the period. For instance, albums of

paintings on the porcelain trade provide visual evidence of how porcelain was actually

sold and distributed in Jingdezhen.

In order to explore the significance of enamelled porcelain in eighteenth-century

China, the theoretical framework presented here is grounded in several different

disciplines, including art history, cultural anthropology and material culture. Arjun

Appadurai and other scholars have claimed that goods have social lives that play

11
complex roles in various societies, periods and cultures. Craig Clunas draws on that

work, and taking China as his focus, places objects in their social context of economic

growth, commercialisation and the breakdown of traditional social barriers,

10 Gazetteers of Jingdezhen and relative contains on porcelain were published in China, such as
Jiangxisheng qinggongye taoci yanjiusuo (ed.), Jingdezhen taoci shigao [The Collected gazetteers
of Jingdezhen] (Shanghai, 1959).
11 Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,1986).
102