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Chinese-language ceramics studies, no Western language work on porcelain had adopted

both a sinological framework and direct object-based knowledge to write a history of

Chinese art. Bushell’s works include his translation of Tao Shuo, rendered in the Oxford

University Publication as Description of Chinese Pottery and Porcelain (1910) and his

comprehensive handbook in 1898 to the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum --

its comprehensiveness captured by the two-volumes’ title, Chinese Art (1904 and 1905).

The story of the rise of British Museums, the importance of artifacts from China

in those museums, and Bushell’s ceramic scholarship was more than a cultural exchange;

it implicated power struggles in the related realms of politics and knowledge. In his own

words, Bushell “gained access to several private and public houses ….which usually are

so closed to foreigners…” Bushell even noted that access to objects were the result of the

opening of the royal houses of the dynasty, which of course was a historical event rife

with international political implications, such as the Boxer indemnities, looting, and late-

nineteenth century wars that rendered the objects for sale for increasing imperial

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revenue.

The disparate titles making up Bushell’s voluminous publishing record on

ceramics obscure the actual inter-textual relationship among his writings. The most

famous of his books, Oriental Ceramic Art, first published in 1896 and generating

reprints as early as 1899, was the first all-encompassing history of Oriental porcelain ever

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published. The research for Oriental Ceramic Art not only provided the basis on which

Bushell wrote in the newly re-named Victoria and Albert Museum handbook, Chinese

Art. In fact, the ceramic sections in the latter were reproduced from the former word-for-

word, reinforcing the prominence and centrality of Oriental Ceramic Art in shaping the