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are encapsulated in a particular exemplary style, in order to leave a coherent impression

on museum visitors, including: incipient Tang sancai, Song classicism, Ming

ornamentation, and Qing technical perfection.

This dissertation has aimed to present an alternate conception of ceramic history.

While the goal of appreciating porcelain and its aesthetics is the same, the narrative it

proposes is the opposite of that to which I was linked at the National Palace Museum.

First, the project has sought to open up the history of porcelain by de-coupling china from

China. It is of course impossible to erase the linkage, as much of the symbolic and iconic

power of these objects come from a profound national cultural attachment. However, by

investigating the ways in which scholars and researchers have appropriated, translated,

and negotiated textual and visual sources about porcelain, this dissertation has shown that

porcelain, as an art object, embodied a diverse and infinite set of meanings for different

people.

Second, this dissertation has sought to complement past scholarship on porcelain

from China by studying a period that has often been ignored in art historical research.

Often, as even the National Palace Museum’s displays attest, the nineteenth century

(including the late eighteenth century) has been glossed as a time of decline. At the

National Palace Museum, only two smaller-sized display cases are devoted to the

nineteenth century. Yet, these studies overlook the fact that it was precisely during this

time when information about porcelain most actively appeared in print or visual form.

Thus, by examining how knowledge was produced, I seek to show the specific

circumstances that enable one to speak of decline or decay, and the histories that are

neglected as a result of such judgments. The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries