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Qing emperors favored symbolic over material instrumentality of these sequentially

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viewed albums.

It was the Qianlong period that saw the utmost development of the genre of

sequentially viewed sets. Aside from the Gengzhi tu, there were two derivatives during

Qianlong’s reign, which were received in imperial audience. First, there are the Mianhua

tu ಗڀྡ (Pictures of Cotton Production) of 1765. In addition, Qianlong specifically

commissioned the porcelain manufacturing illustrations, Taoye tu. Both followed the

album illustration format and found coherence as an ordered set of visual illustrations.

Yet the Taoye tu were not dictated by Qianlong to be reproduced as woodblock prints,

even if they ultimately became the inspiration for the woodblock prints in the Jingdezhen

Tao lu. As discussed in the previous chapter, their reproduction and trajectory was

contingent upon the writing and research of Zheng Tinggui, who was purposefully re-

writing an account of Jingdezhen porcelain for the objective of creating a unified account

of porcelain making in Jingdezhen and the essential role of Jingdezhen in imperial

production. The Taoye tu images’ continuing circulation relied upon a specific moment

that involved the interplay between text and images and also imperial and local action.

With the printing of Jingdezhen Tao lu and later the mid-nineteenth century foreign

translations and re-illustrations of the Tao lu, the porcelain production images became a

type of visual form in their own right.

Qianlong’s interest in particularity and universality (and the intertwined

relationship therein) - as reflected in his ceramics collecting, the duobao ge,

authentication, and cataloguing activities - also provides the context for understanding his

motivation behind the court production of the annotated Taoye tu. The initial aim behind