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approach these paintings from the perspective of viewers, residents, and consumers living

in England and America, who were in the throes of social changes wrought by the

Industrial Revolution and projected their dreams onto a distant Orient. Since these

watercolor paintings catered to the export audience, understood by Clunas as a foreign

market, scholars generally dismiss them as being devoid of any native or authentic

Chinese aesthetic value. This approach depends on a sharp distinction between a Chinese

aesthetic norm and Western tastes and foregrounds the British and American reception of

such images.

The existing scholarly literature on porcelain manufacture images in the English

language has hitherto accredited export and foreign demand as the driving forces behind

the circulation of visual sets illustrating porcelain manufacture. Because of the

attribution to foreign taste, the export albums are often neglected in the scholarly canon

of “Chinese” art and relegated to historical obscurity. Yet, it is altogether possible that

the originating moment cannot be wholly attributed to foreign taste, especially in light of

the chronological order of appearance of these narrative illustrations. The overarching

aim in this chapter has been to highlight the historical order and specific conditions in

which individual sets of Taoye tu images were created in the first place. Their history

included various sub-genres of porcelain production illustration -- export, locally

produced woodblock prints, and imperial album sets. Examining their individual

contexts of production and juxtaposing the sub-genres with each other demonstrate the

history of exchange and influence between disparate people and sub-genres in the

creation of different Taoye tu production images. After all, the Tang Ying memorial

dating to the eighth year of Qianlong (1743) and Imperial Household Workshop record of