Page 35 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

designs and technology that were demanded by the court, and which in this way passed

quickly into more general circulation.
We are fortunate in possessing an eye-witness description of Jingdezhen workshop
practice in the year 1712 by a French Jesuit missionary, Father d'Entrecolles. He describes in
minute detail the extraordinary division of labor that made efficiency and precision possible
without a multitude of master artisans. The most complex pieces, he reports, might go

through the hands of up to seventy workmen. From our modern vantage-point, Father
d'Entrecolles' account reveals that the Chinese ceramic industry was now industrialized,
indeed in the forefront of world industrial development. But the priest himself, knowing only

the pre-industrial practices of contemporary Europe, saw the lack of master artisans as the
expression of an inferior culture. In fact, modern assessments of Jingdezhen products of this
period have often applied similarly inappropriate criteria. It is a commonplace that Qing
ceramics, said to be standardized, mechanical and lifeless, represent an aesthetic decline.
However, the point of reference for this judgment is the pre-industrial ceramics of the Ming

period and earlier, whose decoration tended to come from a single, highly accomplished
hand. Judged as the industrial objects they are, ceramics of the period ca. 1680-1740 appear
in a different light: it is the high standards of quality in a context of mass production that is

striking.
These remarks apply not only to highly decorated wares but also to the color glazed
porcelains of the same period (532). Color glazes place a premium on the technological
control of materials and process that makes a specific color possible. Under the Ming, this
had led to a strictly limited range of colors, and eventually, as economic control slipped away

from the court, to a relative disinterest in color glazes. Under Kangxi, however, not only
were they revived, but the range was vastly expanded and in the early eighteenth century
came to include a vast number of polychrome effects created by controlled accident. These

stand as superb demonstrations of the technological superiority of early Qing ceramics over
early Ming porcelains and Song stonewares. But from the names of the various effects one
can see that they were also highly evocative: moonlight, robin's egg, sacrificial red, tea-dust,
snakeskin green, eelskin yellow. Color glazes direct attention to the form of the object, and
the innovations of shape in these wares reveal changes of thinking and custom. The

proportion of flower vases, for example, is extremely high and seems to reflect a particular
predilection of the Manchu aristocracy. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the
preferred forms of flower vase had tended to be archaistic, based, whatever their medium, on

archaic bronzes. They thus remained within the boundaries of "scholar's taste", gaining much
of their interest from the historical resonances of the form. By contrast, the shapes of the
color-glazed vases that became popular at the end of the seventeenth century can often be