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connoisseurship. The fact that the Xiang Yuanbian illustrated catalogue has in large part

been vilified as a later copy reinforces the importance of cross-border comparisons of

such concepts and the historical contexts of international dialogue that gave rise to such

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divergent constructs as a Chinese collector (Figure 19). In fact, no version of the Xiang

book that dates to the sixteenth century has been found in collections and the version that

Bushell used was the first appearance of the printed book in global antique circles. The

book was found without illustrations and re-illustrated according to the text which was

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found in the 1880s. Xiang’s album might not even have existed in the sixteenth century.

The images in Figure 20 show a comparison of the translated and annotated versions,

produced in the 1880s by Stephen Bushell and 1920s by Guo Baochang, the Yuan Shikai

porcelain official, and American John C. Ferguson. Figure 21 depicts three separate

stages of the process by which the text was translated and annotated, sans visual

illustrations. The entire history of the two later editions, which were based on a textual

discovery in the 1880s disrupts the seemingly unreflective truthfulness of a book’s

existence; the Lidai mingci tupu just might have been the material remnant of wishful

imagination. In light of the (non)evidence, the history of interpretation, extrapolation and

appropriation of ideas and concepts of porcelain is even more important. Whereas the

English collectors essentialized the Chinese connoisseur, Tao Ya’s author saw the

connoisseur as politically relevant for the present. Moreover, he believed that the growth

of understanding was boundless. Chen wrote that the “journey of cultivation has no

ending. The mature student knows that the learning of the collectors do not speak of so-

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called graduating.” By advocating innovation through cultivation, Chen Liu’s text

stands as an example of an imminent critique of westerners’ hegemonic discourses. Thus,