Page 145 - 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

names on porcelain sometimes indicate a commission. Moreover, at this time,

enamelled porcelain produced in the imperial kiln was not only shipped to the court,

but was sold on the private market.

Figure 3-8 shows an advertisement that reads ‘选制官窑各款瓷器,’ literally

reads ‘customized every kind of imperial porcelain’. This detail is of great importance

in terms of issues relating to contemporary porcelain consumption. It firstly shows

that porcelain made for the imperial court can be manufactured commercially; this

again proves my argument that the term ‘imperial ware’ is not appropriate. This

advertisement also indicates that contemporary Chinese consumers were influenced

by the taste of the court. Second, it was advertised that imperial ware could be

customised, which suggests the existence of a well-established market for imperial

wares.

The most interesting and important observation we can make about the second

half of the eighteenth century is that enamelled porcelain came to be part of everyday

life. The perception of enamelled porcelain changed from decorative art into an object

of daily use. Yuan Mei 袁枚 (1716-98), a celebrated poet and literary critic of the

Qing Dynasty compiled a collection of recipes from his own villa in Nanjing. Suiyuan

随 园 was Yuan Mei’s own residence in Nanjing, which housed extraordinary

collections of paintings, furniture, artefacts and porcelains. He believed that food

should be served on fine plates and that these should be colourful imperial ware. The

wine cups should also be made of rare precious materials, such as exquisite enamelled

porcelain, jade, glass and rhinoceros horns. As a contemporary well-known scholar
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63 Yuan Mei, Suiyuan shidan [A collection of recipes] (Beijing, 1984), p.13. For the bibliography
of Yuan Mei, see Arthur Waley, Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet (Stanford University
Press, 1956).
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