Page 140 - 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

Beijing. He requested that the emperor ban these activities because the colour yellow

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can only be used at court. The emperor agreed with his request. This record clearly

shows that enamelled porcelain was consumed outside the court, albeit in small

numbers. It proves, however, that enamelled porcelain was not exclusively circulated

at court. This is a fact that current scholarship and connoisseurship has neglected for

decades.

Moreover, along with the expansion of production, the consumption of enamelled

porcelain in this period expanded, as I will show below. With Tang Ying and Nian

Xiyao’s supervision and expertise, the Imperial Kiln produced enamelled porcelain of

many colours such as black ink colour, purple and foreign red and so forth. Many

private kilns would have imitated the imperial enamelled porcelain during this period,

although the enamelled porcelain produced in the Imperial Kiln was not allowed to

enter the commercial stream. Jingdezhen taolu recorded:

The colourful porcelain (enamelled porcelain) was available but they were

not popular initially. During the first decade of the Qianlong reign, 1740-

1750, it became quite popular and many private kilns produced this type

of porcelain. They do not use traditional ways to fire, rather they used

bricks to build up a kiln and it looks like a well. We call these private

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kilns.

51 The Imperial Workshops Archives, vol.4, p.652. The earliest ancestor of the Chinese was the
‘Yellow Emperor’. Chinese culture originated on the ‘Yellow Plateau,’ the cradle of the Chinese
nation was the ‘Yellow River,’ and descendants of the Yan Emperor and the Yellow Emperor have
‘yellow skin.’ Since ancient times, the colour yellow has been inseparably linked with Chinese
traditional culture. For a general description of the meaning of colours in Chinese culture, see,
Dorothy Perkins Encyclopaedia of China: History and Culture (second edition, New York:
Routledge, 2013), pp.96-97.
52 Lan Pu, Jingdezhen taolu, p.109.
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