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the third year of Qianlong (1738) demonstrate the existence of possibly two court Taoye

tu albums already extant by 1738. The set currently in a French private collection bears

the painter’s seal of Jiao Bingzhen, who happened to have been the first Qing court

painter to paint architectural images influenced by perspective drawing. Painting with

perspective in the Western art historical sense was a technique brought over to the court

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by Jesuit painters and astronomers working at the Kangxi court. According to a study

of a watercolor album held in Sweden, the earliest known export album dates to the late

1730 or early 1740s, making the earliest export album to have appeared either as the Qing

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imperial albums’ contemporary or antecedent. Thus, the influence of Jesuit painters at

the Kangxi court and influence on Jiao Bingzhen shows a history riddled with exchange

and interaction across the boundaries of China and the West long before even the first set

of Taoye tu appeared as a Qing court album constructed for the sake of imperial ideology.

To dismiss or analyze these as quintessentially foreign or “Chinese,” ignores this cross-

cultural history of network and exchange. Moreover, the social life of these images

illuminates the international circulation of visual images of porcelain and perhaps makes

it possible to speak of a global visual culture of porcelain in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries. A community of global viewers with a keen interest in porcelain and the

composition of porcelain shared a viewing practice that was process-oriented,

contributing to a conception of the self that was in the stages of formation in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in both the west countries and in the Qing. Integral to

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this idea of the self is its perception of a developmental temporality.

The vested interest held by Qianlong in Jingdezhen production as demonstrated

by his commissioning of the Taoye tu text-image album indicate a history of production