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acknowledgment of the importance of translation to the identification of porcelain with

his own country. Moreover, his comments stress a distinction between porcelain that was

Chinese, or huaci, and the object’s corresponding phonetic term, “zhina.” He clearly had

encountered the homonymic relationship between the material object and its country of

production but he resisted using the easy pun.

Distinguishing between the moniker “zhina,” and the phrase that refers to Chinese

porcelain as “huaci,” opened up a conceptual space through which Chen Liu could begin

to expound on the subject of porcelain. The key subject of analysis for Chen was ciguo.

The rest of the preface was written as follows:

Lately, our country, China’s, porcelain industry has fallen
decrepit. The reason why our porcelain is able to maintain
its world-wide esteem is because the porcelain that people
of the entire world praise as not in decline or decay is the
antique old porcelain from the early years of the country
(guo). People who live in Zhongguo cannot earn the
respect of other countries with battleships and cannons.
Secondly, our commercial goods cannot compete in the
market. But if we can only rely on the reputation of the
porcelain produced in the early years of this country in
order to boast for the purpose of convincing the people of
the whole world to regard this country as the ciguo [country
of porcelain], then that is the shame of our statesmanship.
To live in the ciguo [country of porcelain] and to not
thoroughly understand porcelain is to earn the derision of
the people of the whole world. To grow up in the porcelain
country, and yet to not know the reason why our porcelain
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is so famous – that is the shame of our people.

These words reveal two important aspects of Chen’s conception of porcelain. First,

Chen’s preface placed the discussion of porcelain in a temporal framework. Porcelain

was not simply part of a discursive field on antiquity (gu), but rather a changing object

with ebbs and flows. His statements regarding the recent crisis of the porcelain industry