Page 113 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

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Jingdezhen Tao lu of 1815 was the first illustrated monograph on porcelain written in the

Chinese language, stripping it of its visual images divested it of one of its unique features

and rendered it not much different from the other ceramic texts included in the Meishu

congshu published during the first decade after the fall of the Qing dynasty: Tao Shuo (1774)

and Gu tong ciqi kao (1776), published in the late Qianlong era. Homogenization of these

texts served to generalize the nature of knowledge contained in each individual work and

create an overarching field of ceramic knowledge. Concurrent with the development of this

national art-historical canon was of course the fall of the empire and its transition to a new

political entity structured around the ideology of the nation. Without the reprinting of the

original illustrations in chapter one, the Meishu congshu emphasized Jingdezhen Tao lu’s

status as a book about one of many components of national art and culture. After all, the

objectives of Deng Shi’s printing company, the Guoguang she, sought to preserve a

(fictitious) “national essence” through periodical publications like the Guo cui xuebao (਷ၘ

ኪజ National Essence Journal), and knowledge-producing study associations such as the

National Essence School. Against this backdrop of a nation-centered compendium, the

appearance of Jingdezhen Tao lu in print during the early Republican period played a major

role in redefining porcelain as “meishu” (fine art) and ultimately as one object among many

in the canon of national art history.

The illustrations did appear in another twentieth-century Chinese-language edition.

They were reprinted in a 1925 version of the Tao lu published in Shanghai by the Zhaoji ಃ

াࣣ୿bookstore. The format of the book was smaller in size, printed by lithographic

method, and a comparison of the images reveals that the woodcuts for the illustrations were