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folding the making of ceramics into a relationship whereby the imperial power was

dominant and almost fatherly in nurture and nature.

Scholars have also located another, albeit incomplete, set of such production

paintings, now stored in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Beijing. There

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are only eight remaining leaves in this album, painted in color and ink on silk. The
eight leaves are:

• Purification of the clay (Figure 7a)
• Making saggars (Figure 7b)
• Making porcelain bodies and placing in kiln (Figure 7c)
• Shaping vases
• Shaping round vases
• Collection of cobalt pigment material
• Decorating with blue-and-white on round wares
• Opening the kiln (Figure 7d)

According to Yu Peichin and Wang Guangyao, researcher at the Beijing Palace Museum,

the Qing court Imperial Household production account contains discrepant

documentation for the production of these albums, so it is difficult to correctly match the

date and origins of the either of the two physical painting artifacts with Tang Ying’s

memorial to the throne of 1743. A 1738 record in the Imperial Household workshops

account records register an imperial edict commissioning a set of twenty paintings

appears in the archives, where “Tang Dai would paint trees and rocks, Sun Hu painted the

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jiehua, and Ding Guanpeng painted the human figures.” However, the item recorded in

the 1745 Shiqu baoji states that the set’s three painters were Zhou Kun, Sun Hu, and Ding

Guanpeng. Clearly, either Zhou Kun replaced Tang Dai after 1738 or there were already

two sets of albums in the Qing court collection. A third album of paintings rendered in

the court style is in a private French collector’s holdings. This set consists of thirty