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and buy (gou ᒅ) [porcelain].” This collector went by the pen name, Ban Chizi̒ຎɿ.

He did not contextualize the book or state his reasons for penning a four-part manuscript on

ceramics in the discourse of nation or history. For Ban Chizi, the Jingdezhen Tao lu was

knowledge, but it was knowledge simply about ceramics: the book served mainly as a

reference guide for connoisseurship. After locating his own text in the same category of Tao

lu and noting that they shared the same purposes, Ban Chizi revealed that he “recorded the

objects of each province’s kilns, styles, and glazes for convenience of porcelain

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identification by those who discuss and buy old porcelain.”

III. International Circulation and Foreign Appropriation of Jingdezhen Tao lu

To circumscribe the story of Tao lu’s transmission and publication history within the

borders of the nineteenth-century Qing state would overlook the perambulatory nature of

canon formation. The idea of “Chinese art” as a verifiable field of study, within which

porcelain constituted a primary object, involved a cross-cultural and supra-national history.

In fact, the process of Tao lu’s canonization into national art history encompassed a journey

of global scope. In this sense, concepts of Chinese art and porcelain aesthetics that came to

the fore in the early twentieth century cannot be attributed to an isolated phenomenon of

national development in which an idea or essence expressed itself in the form of a concrete,

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national polity. As scores of students studying in Japan during the period of the Xinzheng
reforms (1902-1911) brought tides of intellectual change back to their home country, so too

did their activities, learning, and institutions of education, publishing, and translation affect

conceptual transformations. For instance, the new aesthetic and social category of fine arts

referred to as “bijutsu ߕஔ” developed only in the 1890s as a result of institution-building