Page 24 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008
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modern war and foreign attempts to gain power through territorial, scientific, and
economic advantages in terms of production, trade, and goods: the Opium War of the
1850s, and the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895. Yet, as the book’s publication history
shows, the subject matter of a book varies according to the different objectives of the key
people and institutions involved. The original authors were themselves writing and
illustrating for their own purposes; the 1815 author, Zheng Tingui, reconfigured the text
and added images because he was responding to earlier texts and ideas about porcelain
that originated in the inner court of the Qing central government. Thus, Jingdezhen Tao
lu’s history shows that porcelain was a site of negotiation and intellectual contestation,
that a book is not a one-dimensional channel of truth, and that the resultant images of
Jingdezhen sprung from the interaction between court initiatives and local activity.
The third chapter continues along this theme of court and local interactions, but
presents an extended discussion on the role of visual images in the understanding of
porcelain. More importantly, it is an exploration of the nature of knowledge,
representation, and understanding itself. The chapter analyzes the different types of
visual representations of porcelain and demonstrates the advent of porcelain production
images constructed as sequentially viewed painting sets made for the emperor. By the
1730s there may have been as many as three separate imperial court albums depicting the
steps of porcelain manufacture in the form of ordered painting albums for the Qing court.
It was, however, a crucial Qianlong edict that instigated their textual annotation by Tang
Ying, a project completed in 1743 that directly influenced the writing of Jingdezhen Tao
lu and later translations and pictures of imperial kilns. These porcelain manufacturing
albums not only exemplified the Qianlong emperor’s keen interest in the detail and