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