Page 100 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

83

Before the publication of Jingdezhen Tao lu, information about Jingdezhen

production had disseminated mainly through local gazetteers. Much of the writings that

mentioned Jingdezhen included both observations on imperial court and local governance

policies of the porcelain industry and facts regarding the production process and

porcelain composition. Thus, it is difficult to categorize gazetteers as being strictly

connoisseurship literatures, technical treatises, or local society records. For instance, the

Yuan dynasty record about Jingdezhen production activity, Tao ji ௗা(Ceramic

Memoirs) by Jiang Qi ᇸ߁, was accessible to researchers writing during the Qianlong

(1735-1796) and post-Qianlong era only because of its inclusion in Kangxi (1662-1722)

4
and Qianlong (1736-1795) editions of the Fuliang country gazetteer. Pere d’Entrecolles,

the French Jesuit priest who made several discovery trips to Jingdezhen in the early

1700s studied the Fuliang county gazetteer while spying in Jingdezhen and thus was able

5
to refer to Jiang’s text when sending letters on porcelain production.

In his notes about the imperial administration of Jingdezhen kilns, another early

eighteenth-century writer, Wu Yunjia of Hangzhou, recorded porcelain’s material

composition, geographical location of clays, and unique instances in the history of

Jingdezhen porcelain production in a short gazetteer called Fuliang taozhengzhi (Record

6
on Pottery Management at Fuliang). It too was a text transmitted by its inclusion in the
Fuliang county gazetteers and covered primarily the history of porcelain during the Ming

7
dynasty and the first few years of the Qing. Some of his anecdotes were rather
fantastical, including a story about Ming dynasty kilns producing high-grade porcelain

only after a person jumped into the fire. Wu’s history of Jingdezhen porcelain