Page 213 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

4. Neither Empire Nor Nation: Understanding and Appreciating Porcelain in Tao Ya,
1906-1910

Chen Liu ௓ᓭ, who wrote under the pen name of Old Man of the Lonely Garden

(Ji Yuansou ੕෤ࡣ), hated The Records of Jingdezhen Ceramics (Jingdezhen Tao lu).

To him, the book was without organization and pillaged old books haphazardly. In great

indignation, he excoriated The Records of Jingdezhen Ceramics for, in essence,

plagiarizing. “There was later an author, Lan Pu,” Chen Liu wrote, “who compiled,

copied various writings, freely pillaged their words and changed the works name to

1
Jingdezhen Tao lu. The body of the text and examples listed therein are full of errors.”

These strong words were a damning statement of, as we have seen, a vanguard book in

the development of scholarship on porcelain that took place over two hundred years.

Chen’s calumny was an opinion stated blatantly but without much more justification. He

declined to explain why he was so disparaging. However, Chen’s harsh opinion of earlier

work was rather myopic; his own major written work was just as haphazard. Hypocrisy

notwithstanding, his was an opinion forcefully articulated in the next major text on

porcelain written in the Chinese language during the Qing dynasty after the Records of

Jingdezhen Ceramics. An investigation into the themes and content of this major study

on porcelain, entitled Tao Ya, forms the core of this chapter.
Writing some time between 1904 and 1906, Chen Liu was a government official

living in Beijing. Having lived there for more than twenty years, he observed the

operations of an increasingly international antiques market in the context of changing

Sino-foreign relationships and the breakdown of sovereignty of the Qing government.

He witnessed these social relationships and political movements firsthand from a

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