Page 20 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

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kings, and chemists in places as varied as Saxony (in modern-day eastern Germany),

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Istanbul and Paris.

Jingdezhen did not only export porcelain wares. During the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, several fervent attempts to uncover the secrets of porcelain’s

composition and production had already occurred. This lead to the development of a

verifiable economy of knowledge about Jingdezhen porcelain in the eighteenth century

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which expanded through the nineteenth. Circulation of this knowledge was also global
in scope. Ideas about porcelain traveled in the forms of textual documents and visual

illustrations. An important episode of information exchange that highlights this

obsession with unlocking the secrets of porcelain was the publication of two letters dated

1712 and 1722. Written by Pere Francois Xavier d’Entrecolles, a French Jesuit

missionary who lived variously in Beijing and in Jiangxi province between 1698 and

1741, the letters were based on his eyewitness observations of porcelain production

techniques, culled from his many excursions to Jingdezhen. A famous early description

of the unceasing and industrial kiln production activity ongoing at Jingdezhen came from

d’Entrecolles’ letters: “…tens of thousands of pestles shake the ground with their noise.

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The heavens are alight with the glare from the fires so that one cannot sleep at night.”

The result of his “spying” was the first major Western-language description of porcelain

manufacture to reach Europe, the publication and widespread dissemination of which

further fanned the craze for knowledge about porcelain production. After he sent his

letters as reports to his diocese in Europe, the letters reached readers and art lovers almost

immediately. His observations of the production process at Jingdezhen were published in

both English and French-language books in 1717, 1735, and 1736. In the nineteenth