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rests on three things, the quality of the glaze, the handicraft, and the time period” to

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which the porcelain belonged. Furthermore, Chen believed that only with the

configuration of these three aspects could porcelain objects reach an aesthetic level of

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perfection. In another part of the text, he separated the composition of porcelain into

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two integral parts, the porcelain glaze and the porcelain body. In the author’s preface,
Chen defined ci, implicitly distinguishing it from the word tao, which prior to the

publication of Chen’s text in the early 1900s was not a meaningful distinction in written

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documents. When analyzed from the perspective of material science, ci was often

paired with the words for bright and brilliant and referred to celadon, which was a type of

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stoneware. Tao and ci were used interchangeably and after the language reform of the

1920s, taoci became the general phrase for an overarching category that included both

porcelain and pottery. In fact, while twentieth century conservationist scholars armed

with the tools of technology and material science have labored to define the difference

between pottery and porcelain, Chinese textual tradition before the twentieth century did

not emphasize the distinction in the temporal terms Chen employed. Thus, in Tao Ya, we

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have the first usage of ci as historically more advanced than tao. Chen specified that ci
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was “pottery that is durable and delicate.”

If materiality mattered, so did temporality. Linking porcelain to the

indeterminate entity of guo went hand in hand with the elevation of temporality over

place in the description of porcelain in Tao Ya. As Chen Liu had made explicit, porcelain

objects were to be judged by their time period. In Tao Ya, reign periods or dynastic

names constituted the terminology in which porcelain objects were categorized. The