Page 289 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 8 Conclusion

used a number of export paintings as a visual source to provide supplementary

evidence to illustrate the development of the porcelain trade at Canton. It is important

to realise that, besides textual records, visual sources are crucial for reconstructing the

trade. The materials I have used in this research may be used for further research on

the Chinese export trade over a broader historical and geographic range, and could

also be used to consider the tea and silk trade.

In addition to the above-mentioned contributions made by this thesis, my research

has demonstrated that the history of Chinese porcelain and its trade, as presented here,

is neither linear nor one-dimensional. Such a contextualised approach to the Chinese

porcelain trade is necessary and important, and can provide a wealth of information

concerning how production and consumption, whether local and global, interacted in

different time periods.

My research may be followed up in many ways. Except for blue and white

porcelain, enamelled, white porcelain was also imported to Europe in large quantities.

The King of Saxony, Augustus the Strong, had over 1400 pieces of white glazed

5
porcelain made in Dehua, Fujian. White glazed porcelain is also called blanc de
6
Chine, which was collected at the English royal palace at Hampton Court and

7
showed up in the 1688 catalogues of holdings in the Cecil family’s Burghley House.
Records of the VOC and the EEIC have also revealed that ‘white’ porcelain was

imported to the UK in large quantities. The approach used in this research and sources

5 For a transcription of the Dehua porcelain entries in the 1721 inventory of Augustus the Strong's
collection, see Appendix 3 in P.J. Donnelly, Blanc de Chine: The Porcelain of Têhua in Fukien
(London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp.337-347.
6 Blanc de Chine is the traditional European term for a type of white Chinese porcelain, made at
Dehua, in Fujian province, in the northeast of Canton. For a very good overview on Blanc de
Chine, see, John Ayers, ‘Blanc de Chine: Some Reflections’ in Rose Kerr and John Ayers (eds.),
Blanc de Chine: Porcelain from Dehua (Surrey, 2002), pp.19-35.
7 Ibid.p.21.
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