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and culture. First, the chapter begins by giving an overview of the types of written

literature concerning Jingdezhen. Then, it considers the Jingdezhen Tao lu’s publication

history after it first appeared in 1815. Finally, this chapter includes a close analysis of the

document’s content, including both the text and images through a comparison between

the two major monographs produced on porcelain in the late eighteenth and turn of the

nineteenth centuries. It attempts to infer the historical significance of the Jingdezhen Tao

lu by adducing its place in the historiography of Jingdezhen porcelain and tracing its

circulation history. I analyze this text’s significance in the context of three turn-of-the-

nineteenth century developments: a decline in imperial patronage, a change in the court’s

administration over Jingdezhen, and a shift towards Canton-centered export markets. My

analysis will shed light on the nature of material objects and visual artifacts in the context

of a local elite’s intellectual activity and the Qing empire at the cusp of a nineteenth-

century epistemological process identified by Joseph Levenson as the movement from

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“culturalism to nationalism.”

I. The Emergence of Jingdezhen Studies: a Historiography of Chinese Language Texts

An account of Tao lu's meaning in the early nineteenth century turns our attention

first to a general history of texts on Jingdezhen porcelain before the first printing of

Jingdezhen Tao lu. This section considers the significance of Jingdezhen Tao lu by way of

a comparison with and pre-1815 textual sources on ceramics in order to shed light on how

texts about porcelain were produced and disseminated before the nineteenth century.

Between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, Tao lu was by no means the only

document written about Jingdezhen, porcelain manufacturing, and kiln ware styles in the

Chinese language. Before the first publication of Tao lu in 1815, Jingdezhen had already

produced a plethora of scattered writings, more than any ceramic-producing site in imperial