Page 131 - 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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one of them shown in Figure 3-6. As indicated by the author in Figure 3-6 the shop

sign reads yanghuohang (洋货行), translated literally as the ‘stores for selling foreign

goods’. The popularity of foreign goods has played a role in consumer culture, with

those things associated with ‘foreign’ being desirable. With regard to this, enamelled

porcelain, as products that produced in new enamels that originally came from foreign

countries and the painting style as of ‘European’, were favoured for their taste.

36 Xu Yang, a leading court painter of the Qianlong reign, originally from Suzhou, commissioned
a painting by the emperor to paint a scroll on the city life of Suzhou. The work was completed in
1759, and entitled Gusu fanhua tu [Prosperous Suzhou]. Depicting the bustling urban life of
Suzhou, it is a 1241-cm long hand scroll painting, now collected in Liaoning Provincial Museum.
In 2013, the Victoria and Albert Museum held an exhibition entitled Masterpieces of Chinese
paintings: 700-1900 which featured this scroll as the highlight. I visited three times and have
viewed this scroll with magnifier, and have been able to find at least two foreign stuff shops in the
painting. In 2014, this painting was fully published with details, which also confirms that the two
foreign shops were depicted in the painting: see Chen Jingsha, A Masterpiece of Chinese Genre
Painting: Suzhou’s Golden Age (UK: CYPI Press, 2014), pp.99-100.
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