Page 101 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

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management was in fact his abridged version of Tao Shu ௗࣣ(Ceramic Book). Tao

Shu was itself a special section in successive editions of the provincial gazetteer

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recompiled in 1597, the Jiangxi sheng dazhi (Great Gazetteer of Jiangxi Province). Wu

Yunjia’s Fuliang taozhengzhi attracted the attention of the imperial library compilation

Siku quanshu ̬ࢫΌࣣ (Four Treasuries) editors, who categorized the text under the

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History section (shi bu) and Political Administration subcategories (Zheng shu lei). It

was not included in the seven various copies of the librarys books reproduced across the

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country, but Wu’s text did receive notice in the index’s list of titles (cunmu). The full

text of Wu’s Fuliang taozhengzhi did not appear in print until 1851 in an anthology of

collected rare and old books edited and compiled by Huang Zhimoරॣᅼtitled

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Xunmintang cong shuჅઽੀᓉࣣ.

Scattered references to porcelain also appeared in literati jottings, a genre of

writing known as biji അা. The Southern Song dynasty historian and writer Hong Mai’s

ݳᒕRong zhai suibi (Random Jottings of the Rongzhai Studio) and the late Ming literatus

Li Rihua’s ҽ˚ശ (1565-1635) Zitao xuan zazhui (Random Jottings of the Purple Peach

Studio) both mentioned ceramics from Fuliang and Jingdezhen as well as ceramics from

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other production sites. Such jottings included seemingly objective statements

describing the hierarchies of various ware styles, with Jingdezhen often only one of the

many featured. By the eighteenth century, however, jottings of this sort that were most

directly related to Jingdezhen porcelain had also found their way into the historical record

via recompilations of provincial or county-level local gazetteers. Additionally, these biji

references to porcelain had transformed into a genre of specialized individual texts about