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ኜᖕᐑడ, to name only a few. Along these lines of interpretation, Qianlong was

indeed both a patron and scholar of classical culture who endeavored to construct an

image of himself as a follower of this ceramic based moral principle. However, insofar

as Qianlong’s construction of imperial power implicated an ambitious concern for detail,

systemization, and universal knowledge, so too did such ambitions spur the efficacy of

both the format and pictorial content of the Taoye tu paintings for imperial self-

construction.

Tang Ying’s memorial expressed the emperor’s desire for technological detail,

place names, and sequentially ordered visual pictures. In the 1743 Tang Ying preface to

Taoye tu, “Tuci jilue,” no mention of the literary allusion appeared. However, Tang Ying

did give an overview of the techniques necessary for making porcelain by detailing the

minutiae involved in labor and collecting raw materials, molding the shapes of objects

using models and scraping methods, all for the making of exquisite porcelain fit for the

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emperor (tian fu ˂ִ). In addition to being more detailed in content (textually and

visually), there is also an important difference from the Tiangong kaiwu pictures from the

point of view of the image-viewer relations. Viewing the series of actions and techniques

as steps distances the viewer from the object being viewed: the process. Since the entire

set of paintings portrayed a sequential action spanning scenes painted over twenty leaves,

the viewing experience not only captured one’s attention, fixing the viewer to a certain

position outside the object, it also enabled the viewer to observe the flow of time. In this

sense, the Taoye tu album of the Qianlong court, was an instrumental tool for the creation

of a viewing subject who stood outside of time all while being able to observe and hence,

know temporal flow. Perhaps it is this temporal sense, as experienced through visual sets,