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kiln entire and beautiful, today they emerge limp and
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cracked.

A dichotomy exists in Chen’s narrative: the past as the locus of excellence and the

present as the site of impoverishment. Moreover Chen’s descriptions depended on the

use of subjective adjectives posited as objective observations relevant for an entire time

period: rough (kuyu߮⦦), life-like, elegant, refined (xiesheng yazhi ᄳ͛ඩᇘ), or vulgar

and vile (su eڳె). Before this, texts described porcelain in more tangible and concrete

ways – the shape of a vessel, the color of a glaze, the worth in gold, or the geographic

location of its kiln. Decline was posited by Chen Liu in opposition to prior (xi ׷) glory.

To be sure, the pervasive feeling of an exigent crisis did not compel Chen to advocate a

return to the past. Peter Osborne’s observations on modernity’s space-time configuration

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offer some insights here. According to Osborne, the meaning of modernity is unique not
because it designates a chronological stage along a timeline of historical progression.

Rather, it is a way of thinking about history wherein a temporalization of consciousness

pervades all modes of ontology. Modernity derives its significance by defining itself in

purely temporal terms. Tao Ya’s presentation of a post-Qianlong period of decline and

decay of porcelain left a lasting impression on twentieth-century scholarship. It was the

first to put forth such a view of decline and crisis and almost all succeeding studies such

as the History of Chinese Ceramics published in 1936, Guo Baochang’s early 1930s

essay on porcelain (Ciqi gaishuo), and the 2004 comprehensive Science and Civilisation

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volume on Ceramic Technology adopted the same narrative of peak and decline. Later
scholarship has given more technical and scientific flesh to the barebones assessment of