Page 265 - 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

1734 and 1740, the VOC commissioned Pronk to produce designs for Chinese

porcelain. Pronk made four different designs. The deal ended in 1740 because the

production and shipping from China proved too costly. The well documented archival

resources provided a perfect example for scholars to explore the commission pattern

17
of the East India Companies when it came to a special order. This example shows
how a company secured its purchases. On the other hand, from the point of view of

the seller, a similar technique was also applied by Canton porcelain dealers.

Lesley Ellis Miller proved that the silk samples in the eighteenth century enabled

18
silk merchants to retain their domestic and international market. Dagmar Schäfer
has argued that through pattern books of design, the Manchu Qing Empire

successfully managed to control labour, as well as the documentation of production,

19
and its dissemination. In the case of porcelain production, the practice of presenting

samples to customers before putting them into production was employed by the

20
imperial porcelain production at the Qing court at the same time. I have argued in

my MA dissertation that presenting samples before production not only enabled

manufactures to achieve requirements from their sponsors, but also helped the

imperial household to impose their demand on production, and make sure the design

21
and shape were exactly as they required.

17 The most representative works are from C. J. A. Jörg, Pronk Porcelain, Porcelain after Designs
(Groninger Museum, 1980). See also, David S. Howard and John Ayers, China for the West.
Chinese Porcelain and other Decorative Arts for Export illustrated from the Mottahedeh
Collection (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1978), p.294.
18 Lesley Ellis Miller, ‘Material Marketing: How Lyonnais Silk Manufacture Sold Silk 1660-1789’

in Jon Stobart, Bruno Blondé(eds.), Selling Textiles in the Long Eighteenth Century: Comparative
Perspectives from Western Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp.85-99.
19 Dagmar Schäfer, ‘Patterns of Design in Qing- China and Britain during the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries’ in Maxine Berg (ed.), Goods from the East, 1600-1800: Trading Eurasia
(Hampshire,2015), pp.107-118.
20 Hui Tang, ‘Rethinking the Imperial Production of Porcelain of Yongzheng Reign (1723-1735)’
(Unpublished MA dissertation, 2011, SOAS)
21 Ibid.
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