Page 6 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

thereby reproducing the circumstances of the earlier Nanjing site. To the west of the palace,

meanwhile, the Ming planners retained and expanded the huge imperial park centered on two
man-made lakes which had first been created by the Jin planners of the twelfth century, when
the imperial palace had also been located in Beijing.
The fixed structures of the palace complex were complemented and completed by
ephemeral objects to form an all-embracing, 'perfect' environment at the center of imperial

power. The fundamental homogeneity of the palace environment was assured by bureaucratic
control over what was essentially a question of ritual (474). The system that governed the
production of decorative objects involved two parallel offices: the governmental Work

Project Office (Yingshan suo) under the direction of the Ministry of Works, and the
Directorate for Imperial Accoutrements (Yuyong jian) which was a section of the eunuch-
staffed palace administration. Nominally, the Work Project Office had jurisdiction over its
palace counterpart, but in practice power may have lain more with the Directorate for
Imperial Accoutrements, closer to the throne and more directly affected by the decisions that

were made. Archaeological and textual evidence confirm the dependence of the imperial
kilns at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi on drawings and objects sent from the capital, and some of the
more pictorial designs on ceramics owe a clear debt to such court painters as Bian Wenjin

and Li Zai (477). The existence of some sort of central design office to exercise centralized
control over decorative objects would help to explain why the characteristic decorative
language of the Yongle and Xuande reigns remained so stable.
Our picture of Ming decorative arts is seriously distorted by the rarity of surviving
gold and silver objects. From sumptuary laws we know these to have been in wide circulation

as table ware at the highest levels of society, both inside and outside the palace. In addition to
the even more fundamental textiles and porcelain, lacquer too was a crucial decorative
medium at the Yongle court, joined in the Xuande period if not before by cloisonné. The

most reputed lacquer of the late Yuan period and the beginning of the Ming had been made
in Jiaxing on the Zhejiang coast, and lacquer-makers from that area were brought to court
during the Yongle reign to establish an imperial lacquer factory, which continued operation
into the Xuande period and perhaps beyond (476). Carving was far and away the most
popular technique, used to create dense but lucid surfaces of rich blossoms, or scenes of

leisure from the ancient past reminiscent of the works of the court painter, Shi Rui (active ca.
1426-70). The date of the earliest cloisonné for imperial use is still disputed, but there seems
at the very least to have been an upsurge of production in the Xuande period, when strong

and bright colors were in vogue. Despite the hallowed association with the Jingtai reign
consecrated in the Chinese name for cloisonné, Jingtailan, there is more evidence of re-use
and adaptation of earlier pieces at that time than of fresh production. This practice of re-use,