Centring material culture narratives on people and places is what most interests me in my work, so I was excited to review a book that does just that. It situates Tang Ying (1682–1756), the hands-on Qing bureaucrat and multi-talented bannerman, at the heart of imperial production in early to mid-eighteenth-century Jingdezhen.
Tang Ying became arguably the most celebrated supervisor of the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen (China's porcelain capital) through his publication in 1743 of Taoye Tushuo, an illustrated treatise on porcelain production. This renaissance man was a skilled poet, artist, playwright, and potter. He combined technological knowledge with practical skills and sound management of the kiln complex.
Tang Ying's career spanned the reigns of the three great eighteenth-century Manchu emperors: Kangxi (r. 1662–1722), Yongzheng (1723–35) and Qianlong (1736–95). The book demonstrates Tang Ying's talents, including his linguistic skills. He spoke Chinese and Manchu and mastered the Suzhou dialect for a local trading numbering system. Yet this book is more than a biography. The author researches the impact that bannermen official controllers had on the kilns at Jingdezhen and charts the institutionalization of those kilns.
In Porcelain for the Emperor, Kai Jun Chen forensically follows the official story of commissioning, producing, and supplying court porcelain, using the Archives of the Imperial Workshops. He has combined this rigorous investigation of texts with a close examination of a large sample of the surviving material culture relating to Tang Ying's ceramic production. He has also demonstrated a good understanding of the historiography and secondary literature on Qing ceramics.
Chen researches and records the personal family history of Tang Ying, whose father had been one of Kangxi's bodyguards. Tang Ying travelled extensively across China, accompanying the Kangxi emperor to the Northern desert and on the southern tour. His sons and grandson supervised the imperial manufacture of textiles in Hangzhou and of salt in Yangzhou. Tang Ying himself is well sketched. I particularly enjoyed the extensive quotations from his different types of writing, from documenting local flora to composing poetry or plays. He maintained his bannerman identity, which included martial training, while embracing new technological developments, such as those at the experimental imperial workshops in Beijing.
It is rare that anything truly worthwhile is done in isolation and the acknowledgement pages, which are so often skimmed over, show where the author has been and how they interacted with the wider academy. It is probably not the fault of the author, but the “Chronology of Qing emperors” gives the wrong dates for Daoguang (they should be 1821–50) and completely omits both the reigns of the Xianfeng emperor (1851–61) and the Tongzhi emperor (1862–74) from the list of the Qing rulers. Having spent the last six years on a project that rehabilitates the nineteenth century, I found this disappointing. Of course, such mistakes can easily be made, but hopefully they will be corrected in future editions of the book.
Another cause of irritation is the use of ceramic terminology and its translations. For example, qingbai is translated as green-white, not blue-white. Please ignore Wikipedia! Of course, qing can be used to describe the full colour spectrum of nature (green, blue, beige, even black, etc.) but in English these iceberg-blue ceramics are “blue”, not “green”, and the same applies to yingqing (evoking the idea of a shadow blue, not shadow green). It is also not a new idea that the court exercised control over regional technology in the Qing. For example, the Ming Yongle court transformed production at Jingdezhen between 1403 and 1424, and the rubbish heaps excavated from the Ming Chenghua era (1465–87) demonstrate the court's strict quality control over the kilns’ output.
I would also argue that in chapter 4 the constant comparison between seventeenth-century literati commissioning and consuming porcelain is, in a sense, missing the point. You cannot compare flourishing mercantile or scholarly commissioning with court commissioning and then say that the court had greater agency. That is just like comparing apples and pears. It would be much more interesting to compare imperial agency in the fifteenth century with that of the Tang Ying era. Such a comparison might produce quite different results in terms of analysing new shapes, glazes, decoration, and cross-media designs. There are of course more text records for the Qing commissions, but for the Ming you have the physical material evidence from archaeological finds.
As there is so little consistency in the terminology of ceramics, I think it would have been worth illustrating yangcai, falangcai and fencai with images or in an appendix. Both the lack of characters in the text and the black-and-white illustrations are surprisingly old-fashioned.
The book's strengths include its fascinating insights into how Tang Ying created some pieces under his own initiative. Fearful of being extravagant, but eager to push the technical boundaries of production, he absorbed designs and ideas gleaned from close contact with Western crafts. I also enjoyed learning about Tang Ying's snuff bottles, which the author suggests he used as miniature calling cards for his skills, having them fired in the private kilns. Tang Ying is believed to have “invented” flambé and jihong (ritual red) glazes.
In recent years, there have been some superb studies of bannermen technocrats of the Qing era, highlighting their unique relationships with the imperial household. This book's approach immediately reminded me, in a good way, of the work of Wang Yijun, Assistant Professor at New York University, who examined in her work, From Tin to Pewter: Craft and Statecraft in China, 1700–1844, the role of government-appointed officials in the mining industry. She scrutinized officials’ ability to fuse state training with local knowledge that had been acquired on the job by direct observation. These two complementary knowledge systems could then be combined and demonstrated through publications – illustrated printed books or hand-written manuals – to disseminate to a wider audience. In a forthcoming book of conference papers, China's 1800s – Material and Visual Culture, Xue Zhang has examined the role of skilled bannermen in using maps to convey knowledge about the frontiers of empire – their political, social, and economic circumstances which relate directly to the court. The work on bannermen finger painters, bannerman musicians and bannerman literature are further examples of this approach.
I enjoyed reading this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in the arts of the late Qing.
