Page 31 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

As I will show in this thesis, from the point of view of production, there were

interactions between the main manufacturing sites by exchanging techniques, the raw

materials and the craftsmen. From the point of view of consumption, the assumption

that ‘imperial wares’ were exclusively consumed by the court is in fact, untenable.

The term ‘imperial wares’ refers to porcelain that was produced in the ‘imperial kiln’

and was produced for the court. Special kilns were thus established to produce

porcelain specifically for the court, which were named ‘imperial kiln’. However, when

the order from the court was high and large quantities were demanded, porcelain from

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other kilns, namely private kilns that produced porcelain for the market, could also
be purchased and sent to the court. At the beginning of the establishment of the

‘imperial kiln’, it was very strict that only the best pieces of porcelain from private

kilns could be purchased and sent to the court, but towards the end of sixteenth century,

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the boundary between the ‘imperial kiln’ and private kiln was blurring. There is

significant evidence to support my claim that some objects we currently view as

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‘imperial wares’ were in fact circulated outside the court.

Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello have made a further contribution to this

discussion, urging scholars to reconsider the use and interpretation of things in a wider

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context of material cultures and their global interactions and connections. I propose
in my thesis that it is necessary to approach Chinese porcelain in a more historical

22 Private kilns produced porcelain for the domestic and export markets. In 1743, the number of
private kilns in Jingdezhen was up to 300. For a brief investigation of the number of private kilns
during the Qing dynasty, see Christine Moll-Murata, ‘Guilds and Apprenticeship in China and
Europe: The Jingdezhen and European Ceramics Industries’ in Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van
Zanden (eds.), Global Economic History Series: Technology, Skills and the Pre-Modern Economy
in the East and the West (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2013), pp.229-230.
23 Kerr and Wood, Ceramic Technology, p.188.
24 Chapter 3 of this thesis will address this issue.
25 Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (eds.), The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of
Connections in the Early Modern World (Oxon: Routledge, 2016), pp.1-29
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