Page 121 - 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

in the areas of medicine, agriculture and industry. The publishing boom in the

seventeenth century placed such texts into broader circulation, which made the

20
technology widely read. The influence of these books during the eighteenth century,

however, was considerably greater than the seventeenth century.

In the eighteenth century, the emphasis on technology was not only expressed by

the extensive printed books, but can also be observed on the basis of esteem towards

products that embodied complicated and new techniques, such as enamelled porcelain

visible in the documents concerning enamelled porcelain making. One of the most

influential works was by Tang Ying 唐英 (1682-1756) who was the supervisor of

the Imperial Kiln at Jingdezhen between 1728 and 1756. Tang Ying was

commissioned by the emperor Qianlong (r.1736-1795) in 1743 to write textual

21
explanations to an album that had been executed by a court painter. Of this album,
the techniques of making enamelled porcelain were strongly emphasised by Tang

Ying. He described in detail how enamel colours were painted and fired. Given the

fact that this album was reprinted in the following decades in the Jiangxi provincial

20 For the circulation of scientific texts, see Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science
in China 1550-1900 (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2005),
pp.16-23.
21 For the full description in Chinese, see Zhu Yan, Taoshuo [The book of porcelain] (Explanatory
from Du Bin) (Jinan, 2010). For English version, see ‘Tang Ying's annotations for The Twenty
Illustrations of the Manufacture of Porcelain’ translated and with comments by S. W. Bushell,
reprinted together with historical prints and contemporary photographs of porcelain-making in
Robert Tichane, Ching-Te-Chen: Views of a Porcelain City (New York: New York State Inst. for
Glaze Research, 1983), pp.131-70. Yu Peijin, ‘Taoye tuce suojian Qianlong de lixiang guanyao’
[The ideal imperial ware from Explanations of Illustrations on porcelain production], Gugong
xueshu jikan [Quarterly Journal of National Palace Museum], 30, 3(2013), pp.185-237. Ellen
Huang has used this source to demonstrate how text and visual images on porcelain manufacture
were circulated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘From the Imperial Court to the
International Art Market: Jingdezhen Porcelain Production as Global Visual Culture’, Journal of
World History, 23, 1(2012), pp.115-145.
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