Page 201 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 5 Porcelain Trade at Canton 1740-1760

of products to be sold in distant places and in very different cultures. These

shopkeepers made use of increasingly sophisticated marketing strategies, including

advertising and the display of goods. By presenting and displaying samples to their

foreign customers, they managed to reduce the risk of being rejected. The evidence

suggests, I would argue, that there was a group of dealers who served as middleman

between the merchants and the porcelain manufacturers.

5.4. Enamelling Porcelain Locally at Canton?

The period 1740-1760 is particularly important for the study of Chinese enamelled

porcelain. One of the crucial and most mysterious aspects was that craftsmen based at

Canton were able to paint enamel and fire enamelled porcelain at local workshops.

Based on the survey of some particular objects and the increase in special orders

of enamelled armorial porcelain, scholars have assumed that in the 1740s Canton

24
established its own workshops to paint enamel on porcelain. Although there is no

25
evidence to substantiate this, this assumption remained unchanged since the 1910s.
Moreover, present scholarship tends to associate the increasing export enamelled

26
porcelain with local workshops at Canton. My research argues that this assumption
obscures the two separate issues: the existence of enamel workshops and the scale of

their production. The establishment of workshops of enamelling porcelain was not as

24 See, Luisa Mengoni, ‘The Sino-European trade in ceramics: bulk export and special orders’ in
Lu Zhangshen (ed.), Passion for Porcelain: Masterpieces of Ceramics from the British Museum
and Victoria and Albert Museum (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2012), p.20. Rose Kerr and Luisa
Mengoni, Chinese Export Ceramics, (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2011), p.59.Danel
Nadler, China to Order: Focusing on the XIX Century And Surveying Polychrome Export
Porcelain Produced During the Qing Dynasty, 1644-1908 (Paris: Vilo Publishing, 2001), p.50.
25 Stephen W. Bushell, Chinese Art Volume II, (London: 1919), p.40.
26 Mengoni, ‘The Sino-European trade’, p.19.
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