Page 26 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

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chapter demonstrates how ideas about porcelain were historically grounded in

momentous events of the late Qing global setting, how Chen erased entire genres of

porcelain history, and how foreigners came to overlook Chinese voices that were

speaking at exactly the same time the global canon was being constructed.

The chapters that follow examine a series of texts and visual images as case

studies. They were disparate in their moments of production, related in their later

applications and appropriations, and in hindsight, linked to a much broader historical

process. They are important signposts of the nineteenth century journey that ended with

the canonization of porcelain. They reveal an object that seemed to be everywhere and

everything to many people.

1
Fuliang county has changed its name many times. In the Han dynasty it had no separate
existence but was part of the larger county of Poyang. It became a county in its own right
in the Tang dynasty, as Xinping, but was later called Xinchang and eventually Fuliang. It
probably refers to a bridge which crossed the Cheng river at some point in time. It
retained its links with Raozhou (formerly Poyang) as a part of the Raozhou prefecture in
the Ming and Qing dynasties. Zhongguo gujin diming da cidianʕ਷̚ʦήΤɽᗘՊ
[Dictionary of Chinese Place Names Old and New] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan,
1933), 722.

2 Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 103, Table 2.

C.J.A. Jorg, Porcelain and the Dutch China Trade (Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague, 1982).
3
Colin Sheaf and Richard Kilburn, The Hatcher Porcelain Cargoes: The Complete Record
(London: Phaidon, Christies 1988), 97.

4
Naquin and Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (1987), 162. The
woodblock illustration is wrongly attributed to an 1815 edition of the main text or book
under discussion in this paper.

Naquin and Rawski, 104. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton:
5
Princeton University Press, 2000), 160-161.