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suggested an understanding buttressed by an expectation of change over time. Porcelain,

in the Tao Ya framework, was not simply relegated to the general category of the ancient

past, an idea expressed in the word gu prominently featured in “texts on things” that had

gained popularity between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries in such works as Cao

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Zhao’s Gegu yaolun. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, collecting objects
took place in the context of a broader elite penchant for a high culture wherein the

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emphasis was on an aesthetic standard named antiquity. The movement toward
exalting antiquity through artistic production and collection resulted in an increase in the

printing of catalogues and manuals about objects such as jades, bronzes, and inkstones.

This included the Northern Song catalogue that was commissioned by the early twelfth-

century Song emperor, Huizong. It was called the Xuanhe bogutu (The Xuanhe

Illustrated Catalogue of Antiquities). Another catalogue highlighting ancient objects that

attracted attention and reprint efforts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the

privately printed Kaogu tu (Illustrated Research on Antiquities). These two catalogues

were compiled in 1120s and 1092 respectively. They were not concerned so much with

outlining a history of progress or decline; rather they were instructional manuals on

“taste,” markers of elegance and social status. Referencing artifacts by using the

adjective “antiquity” (gu) indicated a functional use of antiquity as an social marker of

difference. Rather than referring to historical change, gu was a marker of “taste” around

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which the highly cultured tried to differentiate themselves from the nouveau riche. A

major thrust of the discussion on porcelain was not on locating its place in antiquity but

on the changes that had occurred over the three hundred years that spanned the dynastic

order of the Qing.