Page 133 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

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technology treatise Tiangong kaiwu ˂ʈකي. In its chapter on ceramic techniques,

Tiangong kaiwu contained thirteen simple sketches printed by woodblocks. Each image

portrayed people in the process of making different types of ceramic objects, including tiles

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and bricks, loading the kiln, and molding clay. All together, Tiangong kaiwu included
thirteen images in a chapter called "Molding Ceramics" (Tao ShanௗẂ), the layout and

numbering of which showed no specific attention to an order of a production process but

focused more on general ceramic technology (Figures 10).

Unlike the individual stand-alone images of seventeenth-century Tiangong kaiwu,

the images of the eighteenth-century Taoye tu and nineteenth-century Jingdezhen Tao lu

were viewed and created with a specific sequential order and chronology. While albums or

sets of paintings commissioned by the emperor were not unique to the subject matter of

porcelain production nor were they produced only during the Qianlong reign, this set of

porcelain production paintings, by the name of Taoye tu, was probably the first visual

depiction of the process at Jingdezhen. The format of the painted sequences borrowed

from the format of the imperially commissioned series collected in the seventeenth-

century 1696 Qing album Yuzhi Gengzhi tu ੿ϙঁᔌྡ, or Imperially Commissioned

Illustrations of Tilling and Weaving, which were themselves based on the two

complementary series of pictures and poems that catalogued phases of the occupations

assigned by Confucian ideology to men and women first composed by Lou Shou ᅽ璹

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(1090-1162) for the Southern Song court around 1145. A defining characteristic of

these illustrations is precisely their narrative illustration format and nature as a set. As

the imperial edicts show, the imperially commissioned sets were first and foremost