Page 255 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 7 Porcelain Dealers and their Role in Trade

Map 5 Map of the Pearl River Delta related to the Canton Trade System (1700–1860s).
Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology © 2009 Visualizing Cultures,
http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/rise_fall_canton_02/cw_essay01.html, accessed on
1 June 2016.

But what eighteenth-century porcelain shops looked like is an area which has

received very little attention to date. Apart from a few scholars who have noticed their

existences in trade, there is no systematic investigation and discussion of porcelain

shops. No researchers have asked questions about what kind of goods these shops

dealt with, what their specialties of the trade were, what the shops looked like and

their relations to the establishment of enamelled porcelain workshops. These

questions are certainly important because these shops were often invisible in the

official records and were neglected by current narratives. 10 Because of such

10 Paul A. Van Dyke is the most prominent researcher to conduct research on shops at Canton,
Paul A. Van Dyke, ‘The Shopping Streets in the Foreign Quarter’ Revista de Cultura, 43(2013),
pp.92-110. This article was reprinted in Paul A. Van Dyke and Maria Kar-wing Mok (eds.),
Images of the Canton Factories 1760-1822 Reading history in Art (Hong Kong, 2015), pp.83-99.
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