9 - Skilled Hands: Managing Human Resources and Skill in the Sixteenth-Century Imperial Kilns

Summary

This chapter focuses on skill, and considers how the sixteenth-century imperial kiln administrators managed their workforce. Skilled craftsmen were in high demand, but they were difficult to control. Most of the workers were mobile; they could take their labour to the imperial kiln, but also find work in the private kilns. The repeated attempts of the kiln administrators to identify skilled workers and bind them to the imperial kilns, and their ongoing expressions of concern over the issue of skilled labour underscore how difficult it was to get hold of good craftsmen. Circulation and mobility characterized the workers' presence in Jingdezhen. The more goods and people circulated and flowed between the various spaces, the more the adminstrators sought to assert their control over it those flows, and the wider the discrepancies between the written representations of the idealized circumstances the administrators envisioned and the actual patterns of movement and flow of resources and skills. Ultimately, the kiln administrators had to reconcile themselves to their inability in asserting control over the labour force. Material and human resources were fluid and flowed relatively freely through the mazelike veins of the Jingdezhen network.