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[porcelain] and thus, it was a problematic text. Instead, Bushell’s Oriental Ceramic Art

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book reflects the information of an expert who has long experience in it.” Laffan goes

on to extol the book by denigrating all existing Chinese texts on porcelain, despite the

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book’s obvious reliance on them, most notably the Tao lu. Here, the order of authority

establishes a certain hierarchy of truth, whereby it seemed that objects themselves were

the source of truth and knowledge. By contrast, texts, and specifically, texts authored by

the Chinese, were ironically inadequate, inferior, and even worthless insofar as providing

actual knowledge about porcelain. In this sense, discussions of porcelain objects were

not impartial mirrors into innocent cross-cultural curiosity and learning. They did not

only reflect innocuous cross-cultural attitudes. Rather, they produced them. Porcelain

provided the arena in which the dynamics of knowledge and power played out. The

denigration of Chinese texts about porcelain was myopic: overseas collectors in Britain

and America viewed their research as superior in accuracy, while ignoring and refusing to

credit the relevancy and contribution of the Chinese texts to the body of knowledge about

porcelain they so sought to collect. In some sense, it was an object-centered discourse

that ignored the reality of human effort and multiplicity of voices that went into

porcelain’s meaning, production, and transmission.

In order to discuss the authenticity of certain pieces of porcelain, Dr. Stephen

Bushell’s seminal book, Oriental Ceramic Art (1896), quoted extensively from Jingdezhen

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Tao lu on numerous occasions. Interestingly, while Bushell drew enormously from Tao lu

to write Oriental Ceramic Art (and its derivative, South Kensington Museum’s handbook,

Chinese Art), the format of the layout on each page of his Oriental Ceramic Art masked the

Tao lu origins of its knowledge on ceramics. In Oriental Ceramic Art, Bushell’s footnotes