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nineteenth to mid-nineteenth century during the Jiaqing and Daoguang periods. Liu

noted that in response to the export demand from Europe, merchants from Canton would

transport fine, white porcelain bodies from Jingdezhen to the Canton area. In Canton,

porcelain bodies would undergo painting decoration, whereby polychrome colors were

added and sealed by a second firing. Liu’s discussion also distinguished the two ways in

which these Canton-decorated and Jingdezhen porcelain bodies were described in the two

major studies on Qing dynasty porcelain: Tao Ya and the Record of Jingdezhen Ceramics.

In the latter book, the authors referred to these porcelains as imitative of yangci (foreign

porcelain). In essence, they did not belong in the same category of Jingdezhen-based

porcelains. In Tao Ya, Chen Liu reversed the definition of the Canton-decorated

porcelains and brought them back into the fold of Jingdezhen ceramics. Chen insisted

that the “Guangdong porcelains with white bodies” were precisely those porcelain wares

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that resembled Jingdezhen porcelain (lue si Jingdezhen suo zhi ଫЧ౻ᅃᕄהႡ).

Clearly, the authors of the Record organized their enumeration of Jingdezhen porcelain

based on whether production of wares took place completely in the town, from the

making of white bodies to the decoration of finished pieces. Tao Ya’s author Chen Liu

regrouped them as Jingdezhen porcelains. The lack of consensus here points again to the

instability of porcelain knowledge and the influence of a writers or collector’s

positionality in the definition of porcelain.

Regardless of how these export wares were produced, they certainly signify a new

development in porcelain production that continued throughout the nineteenth century.

1910 marked the first state efforts to introduce modern forms of porcelain production

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with the founding of the Jiangxi Porcelain Company (Figure 18). Thorough object-