Page 189 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

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The Jingdezhen taotuji album of the nineteenth century and later nineteenth century

export paintings and wallpapers show a remarkable resemblance and even reliance - in

format, composition, and content - to Jingdezhen Tao lu’s woodblock illustrations,

revealing the significant role that a local artist’s sketches might have had in picturing and

understanding porcelain manufacturing and in shaping imperial knowledge and beyond

(Figure 8).

Towards a Conclusion

Craig Clunas has studied the formation of a “discourse on things” through his

investigation of late-Ming period connoisseurship texts. He makes the point that the rise

of texts and the discourse on hierarchies of tastes reflected the commodification of books

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and visual knowledge among elite literati in early modern China. He further concludes
that discussions of things and taste reflected the elite’s anxiety over blurring status

distinctions in a Ming society driven by active consumption. My analysis reveals a

migration and transmission of texts and images that also seem to demonstrate an

increasing interest in knowledge about porcelain in the latter half of the eighteenth

through the nineteenth centuries. But instead of emphasizing the stimulus for such

exchanges in a purely economic sense, including commodification and the related elite

status distinctions in the vein of Pierre Bourdieu, I draw attention to the intricacies of

historical relationships (sometimes exploitative) - including origin, media, and order- by

which information about Jingdezhen porcelain production appeared.

Knowledge about the kilns at Jingdezhen was commissioned to serve imperial

needs, but the scope of this knowledge exceeded the emperor’s intention and official