Page 174 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

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illustrations of farming devices in Nongshu (Agricultural Treatise), written and illustrated

in the first decades of the fourteenth century. Tiangong kaiwu's pictures give no
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indication of the location of these kilns or materials. Unlike the images in Nongshu,

however, the content of Song Yingxing's illustrations contained people as agents and

users of materials and tools. The intended perspective reflected in the illustrations was

much more about the idea that technology involved a symbiotic relationship between man

and his natural environment. Reflective of this, the pictures show people utilizing their

skills to harness the resources available in nature.
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By contrast, the images that were disseminated and were in vogue during the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were created as sets with a specific sequential order

and chronology as opposed to individual stand-alone images. Moreover, they were

specific to the subject of porcelain rather than a broader category of disparate ceramic

materials, as depicted in Tiangong kaiwu’s rather utilitarian focus on daily use items such

as bricks and tiles. Beginning with the second quarter of the eighteenth and continuing

throughout the nineteenth century, at least thirty-five sets of ink-on-paper drawings or

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ink-on-silk paintings depicting porcelain manufacture were drawn. They are extant and
collected in private and museum collections worldwide. Moreover, the pictorial motif of

porcelain production enjoyed widespread appeal through channels of export, imperial,

and domestic trade as well as, from the latter half of the nineteenth century onward,

translation efforts driven by industrializing nations and scientific communities overseas.

Summarizing this visual genre as a whole, Peter Lam, chief curator of the Chinese

University of Hong Kong Art Museum, has categorized them into three categories:

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woodblock illustrations, export works, and court paintings. Again, it was the Qianlong