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st
recorded that “in Qianlong’s 51 year [1786], the position of resident deputy supervisor
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was terminated.” Zheng also noted a change in the imperial court’s relationship to

Jingdezhen when he remarked in his poems, Taoyang zhuzhici (Bamboo Grove Poems

from Taoyang [Jingdezhen]) that Jingdezhen supervision fell under Raozhou prefecture

and that the position of a resident imperial kiln supervisor no longer existed in the early

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Jiaqing period. First published in the Fuliang County Gazetteer in 1823 during the

Jiaqing reign, the Bamboo Grove Poems were a collection of thirty poems accompanied

by the author Zheng Tinggui’s annotations that were dedicated to Jingdezhen. The

poems again appeared in the 1832 Daoguang version. They were edited by Gong Shi, a

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Nanchang native and Fuliang county official. In the Taolu, Zheng wrote that the

Jiaqing administration “decreed to value frugalness” (zhaoshang jiejian൝ਫ਼ືᄉ),

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implying his anxiety over the court’s decreasing investment in Jingdezhen. Writing

sometime after 1815, the first year of the Jiaqing reign, Zheng reiterated this point in his

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second poem of the Bamboo Grove Poems from Taoyang. Since the poems were

written specifically about Jingdezhen customs, of which porcelain objects were the

primary material icons, the poems reflect Zheng’s ambition to write and thus herald the

reputation of Jingdezhen the locale -- even more so than the text of the Jingdezhen Tao lu

itself.

In 1786, the Imperial Household department ceased the appointment of Imperial

Household officials (neiwu ren yuan ʫيɛࡰ) and their deputy assistants (zhu chang

xie li ታᅀ՘ଣ), who had previously resided in Jingdezhen and Jiujiang in order to

oversee the production of porcelain. Moreover, as Zheng Tinggui noted, the court turned