Page 97 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

2. Texts on Jingdezhen: The Record of Jingdezhen Ceramics and the Development of
a Canon

This chapter describes the provenance of major sources of information concerning

ceramic history and production leading up to the first individual monograph to focus on

Jingdezhen porcelain written in any language, the Jingdezhen Tao lu (Record of

Jingdezhen Ceramics). The overall chapter concerns the publication, significance, and

historical context of this key text. First written in the last year of the Qianlong period by a

Jingdezhen literatus, the book was later edited, augmented, and finally published in

1815. While this text forms the basis of many twentieth-century studies on ceramic

technology and art conducted by scholars both in and outside of China, few studies

concentrate on the history of this text in terms of its nature both as a material artifact and

as an inter-textual document. A key focus of this chapter’s narrative is to stress the

Jingdezhen Tao lu’s relationship with other texts on ceramics; the chapter is an attempt to

go beyond a positivist reading of the text. Instead, it aims to engage in an inter-textual

analysis that views the ideas and concepts in the book as having developed in relationship

to their printing contexts. In the Chinese language, it was the first attempt to produce a

comprehensive book on porcelain production and aesthetics focused on Jingdezhen that

was eventually published in a non-official context. The 1815 edition was also the first

document published specifically about Jingdezhen porcelain that was accompanied by

visual images.

Unlike twentieth-century exhibition catalogues and art journals, Jingdezhen Tao

lu and its accompanying illustrations represent a mode of understanding porcelain’s

development before porcelain was tied categorically and definitively to national identity

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