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libraries. Thus, by the end of the first century after the book’s original publication, the book

had already circulated beyond Jingdezhen. Moreover, there were three separate woodblock

print editions and two sets of woodblock illustrations, attesting to the Tao lu’s significance

and ongoing relevance.

After the fall of the Qing dynasty, Jingdezhen Tao lu reprints increased in salience.

Just as the numbers of ceramics from the former imperial palaces increased in the

flourishing twentieth-century art market, so too did the relevance of the book. Tao lu

became a fixture in the creation of a modern discipline of Chinese art history and satisfied

the curiosity of porcelain collectors worldwide. Almost every major book on Chinese

ceramics since the end of the nineteenth century to the present relied on the Jingdezhen Tao

lu to reconstruct the history of porcelain-ware styles and Jingdezhen technological process.

It was and still is an important reference for writers of ceramic technology, connoisseurship

studies, and Jingdezhen historical scholarship. By the early twentieth century, its inclusion

in the first edition of the major compendium on fine arts, Meishu congshu, secured Tao lu’s

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place among the works constituting the canon of national art history. The project to

compile the compendium, Meishu congshu, began just before the fall of the Qing dynasty in

1911. The first edition was completed in 1918. Edited by the national-essence school

thinker, Deng Shi቎ྼ (1871-1955), the series was published under the auspices of the

national-essence publishing house, Shenzhou guoguang she ग़ψ਷Έٟ, which was

founded by the same scholar. The compendium’s compilers also included the famous

guohua painter, Huang BinhongරႷࠀ, whose name as one of the two major compilers lent

credence to the entire congshu series. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century,