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Secondly, Chen connected porcelain with governance, rather than with cultural

essence. In fact, he resisted using the word zhina to discuss porcelain. Disarticulating

china from China, Chen preferred instead to use the term zhina ci to mean porcelain. He

then harnessed the phrase ciguo [Country of Porcelain] to refer to his political entity, the

Qing dynasty. Whatever his implied reason for such a de-coupling, Chen’s use of the

word guo connected a government institution to porcelain. The linking of porcelain to

some aspect of the state, of course, was not new. The Records of Jingdezhen Ceramics

(Jingdezhen Tao lu), which to Tao Ya’s author was a book worthy of utter contempt, also

exalted a view of ceramic objects produced by and for a governing body. For the authors

of the 1815 edition of Records, that governing body was literally embodied in the

physical presence of a person, a porcelain production supervisor sent from the inner court

of the central government to live in Jingdezhen as a production overseer. Chen did not

specify which branch of the central government was the most significant in the

production of porcelain. Rather, the configuration stressed a connection between

porcelain and a more general management entity, the central polity, guo. In addition to

being suggestive of historical change, porcelain now inhabited a different spatial context.

The change comprised a shift from a focus on Jingdezhen to the political - and temporal -

boundaries of the dynasty.

Emptying the Jingdezhen focus of porcelain’s qualities, Chen stressed the

imperial aspects of porcelain. He was interested in propagating knowledge of porcelain

and specifically of Qing dynasty porcelain. In Tao Ya, the axis of value turned on two

points: porcelain as a material and its date of production. In fact, Chen succinctly

outlined the criteria by which porcelain should be assessed: “The beauty of old pieces