Page 121 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

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Julien’s book was the first Western language study on Chinese porcelain to introduce

Chinese writings on ceramics to Europe. The book Histoire et Fabrication de la

Porcelaine chinoise was introduced into France via a French translation. The translator,

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Julien, was a professor who taught at the Collège de France. His work, published in 1856

in Paris, was not actually a straightforward translation. The translation included a

compilation of other Chinese texts about Jingdezhen. For instance, Julien drew from the

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Fuliang County Gazetteer to produce the text. Moreover, Julien only included the first
seven chapters from the Jingdezhen Tao lu; he completely excised the last three chapters

(juan ՜) from the French translation. The neglected juan from Jingdezhen Tao lu consisted

of a haphazard selection of the literary references and local anecdotes drawn from texts from

antiquity, Fuliang gazetteers, and literati biji. A cursory glance at the included and excluded

sections indicate that Julien’s abridged version aimed to provide information on the

technology of glazes, enamels, and color composition for ceramic developers and chemists

in France in the late-nineteenth century. As the French preface reveals, Julien intended for

his book to be a technical manual that would provide a scholarly resource for chemists

improving porcelain techniques at the Sevres Imperial Porcelain Factory located just outside
̀

Paris. Tao lu’s transmission into France accompanied contemporaneous shipments of such

raw materials as clay and stone sent by Chinese Catholic priests to Sevres by way of
̀

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Canton.
In addition to the translating only the first seven chapters of Tao lu, the French

version included re-formatted visual pictures of the production process, re-illustrated using

lithographic printing technology. Just like the Jingdezhen Tao lu, Julien’s French version

also included fourteen images of making porcelain. There are differences in the layout