Page 287 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780
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CHAPTER 8 Conclusion
of enamelled porcelain as ‘useful knowledge’, this research has traced the
transmission and innovation of enamelling techniques on porcelain. While current
scholarship only focuses on how local manufactures supported the court, my analysis
of the transmission of enamels and enamelling techniques on porcelain revealed
interactive relations among the imperial workshops at the court, Jingdezhen and
Canton. Moreover, in contrast to the current view of ‘useful knowledge’ as being
largely controlled by the imperial court in China and on the whole inaccessible to the
wider population, my discussion of the transmission processes and networks has
shown that the emperor and the workers in the imperial workshops of the Qing court
responded actively to the influx of new techniques. I have also been able to show that
the technological knowledge owned by the court was indeed accessible for
manufactures beyond the imperial court.
Following the discussion on technological innovation, I explored the impact of
this development on consumption, both domestically and globally. This discussion
viewed enamelled porcelain as a type of commodity that embodied values that were
attractive to eighteenth-century Chinese consumers. My analysis of domestic
consumption in the eighteenth century has further shown that enamelled porcelain was
not merely consumed by the imperial court, but reached a wider market.
In drawing attention to the records of the English East India Company, the present
research has also provided a detailed discussion of the ways in which the Chinese
producers and merchants actively participated in the trade in enamelled porcelain.
This is the first time that the Chinese enamelled porcelain trade with the EEIC has
been investigated to this level of depth. My analysis showed that the trade of
enamelled porcelain could usefully be separated into several chronologically separate
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