Page 94 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 2 The Production of Enamelled Porcelain and Knowledge Transfer

skills. Meanwhile, the imperial workshop also sent artisans to Jingdezhen and Canton

to supervise and teach artisans there. Along with the communication and exchange

among the imperial workshops and manufactures in Jingdezhen and Canton, the court

created a system that facilitated the dissemination of new techniques and ideas, the

new technique was inevitably spread to Jingdezhen and Canton.

A similar example of this type of court patronage for artisans can be found in the

sixteenth-century Italy. As Luca Molàshows, ‘under the first three Medici dukes, a
large of number of different craftsmen from other parts of Italy and Europe were put

together in a single location so that they might exchange information among

46
themselves.” He argues that Italian court workshops played a very important role

in promoting and improving new ideas and technological innovations. Molàpoints
out that the Venetian government positively encouraged innovation by introducing a

system similar to patents, whereby inventors were guaranteed the initial profits from

the application of their ideas. 47

What distinguished the Qing court from the Venetian Government was that the

Qing court also produced large amount of written texts and images of techniques and

allowed such information to circulate widely. For example, in year 1743, the Qianlong

emperor commissioned a set of twenty illustration of porcelain production with textual

explanations. The twenty paintings were painted by the court painters and the textual

explanations were made by the porcelain artist Tang Ying, who was also the

supervisor of the Imperial Kiln in Jingdezhen. The fact that much knowledge about

porcelain production originated in the texts and images was thus spread from the court

46 Luca Molà, ‘States and Crafts: Relocating Technical Skills in Renaissance Italy’ in Evelyn S.
Welch and Michelle O’Malley (eds.), The Material Renaissance (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2007), pp.133-153.
47 Ibid.
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