Page 240 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 6 A New Context of Porcelain Trade 1760-1770

during the season 1761? The most important factor is probably the increased

production of local workshops at Canton.

It is worth mentioning again the issue of when exactly Canton started to produce

its enamelled porcelain. As I have shown in Chapter 5, current studies believe that

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enamelled porcelain in Canton began production during the 1740s. In drawing
attention to a different source, I use the trade data of the VOC and the EEIC to propose

a different theory, by which I argue that Canton only started to produce enamelled

porcelain at a large scale during the late 1750s. This issue is worthy of repetition in

this chapter, because the establishment of workshops of enamelled porcelain resulted

in a dramatic increase in porcelain trade. From the 1760s onwards, the production of

enamelled porcelain shifted from the main site in Jingdezhen to Canton. To recognise

this shift is certainly very important to studies of Chinese export porcelain. Firstly, the

shift marked a different trade of enamelled porcelain from the previous period. From

a production point of view, this enamelled porcelain produced in Jingdezhen were not

directly sold to foreign customers, rather they were channelled by porcelain dealers

and it was not particularly produced for the overseas market. The workshops at Canton

were established particularly to meet the requirements of overseas markets. Only from

this period onward can we determine the porcelain produced at Canton as being

‘export’ porcelain. Secondly, the recognition of such shift will shed light on the

studies of Chinese enamelled porcelain of the later period of the eighteenth century.

For curators and collectors of Chinese enamelled porcelain, it is important to

understand the trade of enamelled porcelain experienced dynamics. With a better

56 Works from Jörg, Mengoni and Shi Jingfei all agree that during the 1740s, Canton started to
produce enamelled porcelain.
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