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duties to the Jiujiang customs office. Clearly, the nineteenth century album took as its

departure point the changing relationship between Jingdezhen and the imperial court,

centered specifically on the Jingdezhen as the site of the imperial kilns (Figure 10).

Porcelain production images continued to attract imperial attention in the

nineteenth century, a century often glossed over as the century of Jingdezhen and

porcelain’s decline. For instance, the Shanxi Museum has in its collection a dual set of

famille-rose porcelain vases portraying the production process at the Jingdezhen imperial

kilns (Figure 11). The collection at the Beijing Capital Museum also includes a large

blue and white porcelain plate produced during the Guangxu period that depicts porcelain

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production at Jingdezhen imperial kilns (Figure 12). Both images show remarkable

resemblance to the first leaf of the Jingdezhen taotuji album in content. All three works,

as seen in Figures 9, 11a and 12a, show a zoomed-in digital image of the flag waving the

words “yuyao chang,” denoting the imperial kilns as the scene of production activity.

The media itself is now porcelain and not a set of sequentially ordered illustrations yet

they signify the lasting influence of the book Jingdezhen Tao lu and its commemoration

of Jingdezhen as the location of the imperial kilns. Their mutual similarities also suggest

a closer relationship than previously envisioned among visual sub-genres usually studied

in isolation. This roundabout history of circulation cannot be reduced to a unidirectional

narrative of Western-influence driven by export tastes or even top-down history of court

driven production. In fact, the dating of the Jingdezhen taotuji album as being

subsequent to the woodblock prints of the Jingdezhen Tao lu (1815) strengthens the idea

that the Tao lu’s mission to raise the banner - literally, visually, and figuratively - of the

imperial kiln as being situated in Jingdezhen was quite successful (Figure 9, 11a, 12a).