Porcelain Production

Porcelain production is understood in this bibliography as a process of human labor manipulating raw materials by means of tools, which yields vessels that can be used to contain liquids or solids or for display. Selected books and articles here focus on the technological process and the labor organization in Chinese history. They investigate the raw materials such as porcelain rock, intermediate materials such as glaze and pigment, tools such as throwing wheels and kilns, and the procedures according to which they were used to produce broadly defined porcelain. The economic processes such as commission, trade, and collecting, which largely drove production, are outside the remit of this bibliography. Following modern standards, ceramics here is understood to include earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain, with porcelain being only the high-fired ceramics. Studies of ceramics and porcelain in Chinese connoisseurial literature before the 19th century, as well as collectors’ research outside China since then, have been dominated by the urge to date, authenticate, and identify regions of production based on formal traces left on vessels and auxiliary tools. These inquiries share much evidence and methodology with the study of production, although the latter focuses more on reconstructing the process of making. It often expands the pool of sampling to less famous types of wares in order to answer questions regarding the transmission of technology, use of natural resources, and labor organization. Modern replication or experimental archaeology also takes great interest in reverse engineering the technology of production. This bibliography is divided into six sections. The first section introduces three definitive works that establish the basis of the bibliography, in order to avoid overlapping references. Then five sections each reflect on a specific approach: Sporadic archaeological surveys since the early 20th century, and extensive salvage or controlled excavations of kiln sites in China proper since the 1950s have yielded much evidence of production. Scientific examination of ceramics by means of various laboratory devices has been the fastest-growing field since the 1980s. Meticulous comparison of vessels in museums and collections, as well as archaeological discoveries, has always been a rewarding art-historical approach in inferring productive techniques. The same thing could be claimed about finding new information from inexhaustible textual sources from premodern China, especially imperial archives and inventories. The last section combines historiographies treating the productive process as social organization, and scholarship paying special attention to the issue of design.