Page 132 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008
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which Zheng Tinggui’s edited texts became published as the 1815 version of Jingdezhen
Tao lu.
To analyze the purpose of the Jingdezhen Tao lu necessitates a consideration of its
authorship and illustration history. As has been shown in this chapter thus far, one of the
main intellectual objectives behind the Jingdezhen Tao lu was Zheng Tinggui's ambition to
posit a Jingdezhen-centric narrative to imperial porcelain production and history. The
emergence of the book's text and visual images originated from Zheng's reconfiguration of
Tang Ying's words that had first been paired with paintings. In other words, it was a
negotiation between image and word. In the case of Jingdezhen Tao lu, it was a product of
intertextual and inter-iconographical relations. In 1743, following an order of the Qianlong
emperor, Tang Ying traveled to Beijing and there, he annotated a set of twenty paintings
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illustrating the manufacture of porcelain. The paintings were commissioned by the
Qianlong Emperor and painted by Sun Huᵷ, Zhou Kunմ㆕, and Ding Guanpeng ɕᝈ
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ᘄ, three painters of the Qing court painting academy. The memorial by Tang Ying
indicates that he received the set of twenty illustrations from the Imperial Household
Workshops (Yangxindian zaobanchu) on July 13, 1743. The emperor's edict, conveyed
two weeks earlier, instructed that Tang Ying write annotations regarding the technique and
affairs of pottery production. The edict also dictated that Tang Ying should order each of
the paintings and explanations before presenting the paintings as a visual album to the
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Qianlong Emperor.
In the latter half of the eighteenth through to the nineteenth centuries, knowledge
about porcelain traveled via texts and visual images. As noted before, Jingdezhen Tao lu
was the first book devoted to Jingdezhen porcelain manufacture and history to be published
with visual illustrations. Jingdezhen Tao lu’s woodblock prints were not the first visual
depictions of porcelain production. The claim to vanguard status belonged to the late-Ming
