Page 120 - 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

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production. The value of goods for consumers is thus considered to be dependent

upon its manufacturing procedures and its workmanship. The research mentioned

above mainly focused on the Europe of the early modern period, while in this thesis,

I aim to examine as a particular type of product the value of enamelled porcelain for

the eighteenth-century Chinese consumers.

3.4.1. Craftsmanship

The first value that enamelled porcelain embodied is the aesthetic value of the

complex craftsmanship involved in the manufacture of enamelled porcelain, which to

date has received little attention in the current scholarship. Seventeenth-century China

saw the compilation of a number of comprehensive summaries of Chinese technology.

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Works like Systematic Pharmacopoeia (Bencao gangmu, 本草纲目), Complete

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treatise on Agriculture (Nongzheng quanshu, 农政全书) and Exploitation of the

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works of art (Tiangong Kaiwu, 天工开物) represent the highest level of summary

16 Berg, Luxury and Pleasure, p.26; Helen Clifford, ‘A Commerce with Things: The Value of
Precious Metalwork in Early Modern England’, in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds.),
Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650-1850 (New York, 1999), p.148;
17 This is a Chinese material medical work written by Li Shizhen (1518-1593) and published in
1596. It is a work epitomising the material medicine known at the time, which is regarded as the
most complete and comprehensive medical book ever written in the history of traditional Chinese
medicine. It lists all the plants, animals, minerals, and other items that were believed to have
medicinal properties.
18 This was written by Xu Guangqi and published in 1639, which it is believed Xu had drafted
with collaboration of his colleagues and friends. See, Catherine Jami, Peter Mark Engelfriet,
Gregory Blue, Statecraft and Intellectual Renewal in Late Ming China: The Cross-Cultural
Synthesis of Xu Guangqi (1562-1633) (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p.335.
19 Song Yingxing, Tiangong Kaiwu [The Exploitation of the Works of Nature], 1637; reprinted
in 1989 with explanatory notes by Pan Jixing, see Pan Jixing, Tiangong Kaiwu jiaozhu yi yanjiu
[Study of the Exploitation of the Works of Nature with explanatory notes] (Chengdu: Bashu
shushe, 1989), p.426. Tiangong kaiwu has been translated into English by E-tu Zen Sun and Shiou-
chuan Sun as T'ien-kung K'ai-wu: Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century (Pennsylvania:
Penn State University Press, 1963).
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