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hitherto been privately stored can be understood. An aesthetic understanding of porcelain

was a part of a person’s social and moral being. Chen also held favorable views toward a

book that similarly placed utmost value on collecting porcelain and the collector’s

knowledge about the history of porcelain: the Xiang Yuanbian illustrated manual. As I

have discussed earlier, in Tao Ya, the Lidai mingci tupu (Illustrated Catalogue of

Porcelains of Successive Dynasties) was the focus of much praise and Tao Ya aspired to

be its successor.

At the same time that Chen was announcing and celebrating the social roles of the

collector, English collectors pointed to an image of the Chinese collector as one of the

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key indicators of authenticity, an emerging standard for porcelain collectors in Britain.

As mentioned, the late 1880s and 1890s saw the rise of a new standard by which

collectors in England chose porcelain. With the looted objects from imperial collections

available for consumption by foreigners and antique dealers in Beijing, there emerged an

idea of authenticity based on a late nineteenth century concept of Chinese taste. One

could presumably access authentic taste by understanding the Chinese collector. Bushell

commented in his essay on the significance of the Xiang album:

The Chinese collector is an antiquarian first and cares more
for an incense-pot, dulled by centuries of war, than for the
most brilliantly decorated of the vases in which we delight.
The objects are often ugly enough, but it is impossible to
get a notion of the progress of the ceramic art without some
acquaintance with them. In the absence of specimens, some
help may be got from figures, and the main purpose of my
paper is to bring before the notice of the Society an
illustrated manuscript catalogue, in four volumes by a
collector of the sixteenth century of our era, who has drawn
in colour and described eighty-two explanations of the
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different kinds of porcelain.