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leaves depicting steps in making porcelain. This set bears the mark of Jiao Bingzhen ೊ

٢ࠊ, a painter for the court of emperor Kangxi and active in the Kangxi and Yongzheng

reign periods. Since the years of Jiao Bingzhen’s painting career at the Qing court ranged

from the late 1680s through 1722, it is possible that the earliest sets of Taoye tu visual

images were already in existence in the early 1720s. The Tang Ying memorial indicates

textually that by 1738, one or perhaps both of the court Taoye tu albums had already been

painted and presented to the emperor.

Having in part been the impetus for the writing of Jingdezhen Tao lu in the early

nineteenth century, the imperial court painting set Taoye tu that was annotated by Tang

Ying had a direct impact on the transfer of the motif onto woodblock illustrations and

their translations and reprints in France and Japan during the years of heightened political

clash and scientific inquiry. As shown in the previous chapter, the court images provided

the context for the image-text pairing, whereby the Tang Ying annotations initiated the

writing project of Zheng Tinggui. Zheng’s own textual rendition of the Jingdezhen

porcelain making process acquired its own corresponding visual images, the pairing of

which became the illustrated first chapter of the 1815 publication of Tao lu. Also

mentioned in the previous chapter is Taoye tu’s adherence to a sequential visual format

narrating a production process that first appeared during the reign of the first emperor of

the Southern Song, Gaozong (reign years 1127-1163). Between 1132 and 1134, Lou

Shouᅽ璹 (1190-1162) a native of Zhejiang province who at the time was an official

stationed in Jiangnan, the center of the country’s most advanced rice farming techniques

in the twelfth century, painted two sets of twenty-four images showing in visual form