Scarcely a year passes without Sotheby's - one of the world's leading auction houses - offering at least one stunning masterpiece of Qing-era porcelain. As museums and private collectors fiercely compete for these coveted treasures, a captivating new book reveals the intricate mechanisms behind the production of these imperial marvels. Guiding us deep into the world of material and textual archives, Kai Jun Chen's Porcelain for the Emperor: Manufacture and Technocracy in Qing China is dedicated to a stratified class of skilled practitioners who governed the Qing empire on a daily basis. It stands out as a work that broadens the view on Qing governance and expert cultures. Readers will enjoy its astute and sensitive contribution to the historical dimensions of technocracy - a technology-driven philosophy of statecraft that rulers employed long before modern carbon-based technocracies.

Since first being coined by the Californian engineer William Henry Smyth in 1919, the term "technocracy" has proliferated to encompass many nuances of a philosophy of statecraft that prioritizes technology and industrial demands. Porcelain for the Emperor explores the significance of a stratified group of experts working for an empire that systematically invested in material culture production. Bannermen - the term is a "socially and culturally constructed ethnic categorization based on historical allegiance to the conquering group" (131) - have long fascinated Western-language historians: Jonathan Spence prominently elucidated the close relation between Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor: Bondservant and Master in 1966. [1] In contrast, Kai Jun Chen emphasizes the collective. Detailing the bannermen's training, daily work, writing, and role in technical and managerial innovation, he argues that understanding these experts is essential to grasping the empire's power, which was constructed upon material culture, with porcelain wares serving as tools of tribute, commerce, and control to secure loyalty, silver, and opium. Bannermen "formed a knowledge culture nourished at the multiethnic court yet exerting influence on regions at the empire's border". (11) They implanted imperial concerns about Manchu cultural heritage into local cultures and promoted a Manchu version of "Chinese" legacy to stabilize and legitimize their rule.

The book's detailed archival studies offer insights into an industry in which design and production were spatially and socially segregated: kilns a thousand miles away from the imperial court executed designs conceived in workshops in Beijing. While Zhao Bing has emphasized how this caused Tang Ying, the superintendent of the imperial porcelain manufacture in Jingdezhen, to become mobile [1], Kai Jun Chen unfolds a world of constant and systematic exchanges between expert craftsmen, objects, samples, and written notes. Systematic communication was key for a "planned economy" (45-48) in which kilns produced prototypes, officials inscribed each piece of porcelain with a registration number, and the ministries of work, finance, and rites had to coordinate the allocation of labor, money, and resources to ensure imperial standards of design and propriety were met.

Through the lens of technocracy, Kai Jun Chen is able to reengineer the fine mechanics of porcelain manufacturing networks. He also gives non-China specialists important keys to unlock the intricacies of distinctly Chinese administrative and social processes. Like German cameralists, bannermen adhered to principles of appropriate behavior, governance, and administrative conduct within the state's management and public affairs. But while the German state demanded decorum, bannermen were its main defenders in China. Bannermen also differed substantially from Humboldtian German cameralist engineers, as they were in charge of culture too. The same minds and hands who experimented with glaze recipes or rattled off work guidelines were also invested in cultural production. As intimate confidants of the emperor, they collected regional operas, such as Kunqu ("I hear the local dialect approaching noisily" (128)), and used such entertainment, including shadow plays, to spread and suppress social and political rumors.

While the Qing era is often portrayed as a precursor of modern mass production, the division of labor, and factory work, Kai Jun Chen shows that Qing efforts to standardize wares and skills and to increase porcelain production were driven by an idea of cultural unity. This meant that bannermen such as Tang Ying also produced literary work. Combining ethnographic detail and field work with archival meticulousness, Tang Ying's Illustrated Manual of Ceramic Production (1743) introduced a new narrative strategy that differed from that used by the Chinese literati, featuring as it did a pictotextual index, precise instructions, and quantified processes. Differences between the writing of bannermen and literati may seem trivial rather than pronounced when examining the Qing dynasty's reliance on Song-era precedents for imperial catalogues on weaving and tilling. Nevertheless, Kai Jun Chen's own thoughtful and elegant writing deftly illustrates the close connection between the clarity of practical instructions on slip notes - describing color palettes and material compositions - and the refined artistry of the poetry and prose produced by bannermen. A key skill of technocrats, one could argue, is the capacity to immerse oneself in diverse contexts and to recognize crucial details and connections.

The book closes with an examination of the bannermen's role in technical innovations. While this final chapter tackles ground that has already been well covered, its major contribution is a masterful illustration of the flow of technical information through the material and textual archives of the Qing. Only because information was communicated via multiple channels - orally, in texts, in materials, as political intel, and in social and ritual processes - were potters in Jingdezhen able to produce the large numbers of identical eggshell bowls or massive blue and white fish bowls conceived in the various northern courts of Beijing. Including samples and materials, Porcelain for the Emperor shows that no archive was ever meant to function as a stand-alone, nor can it be studied as such. This feature alone makes the book a must-read for all Qing historians.

"The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new," noted the influential English writer and literary critic Samuel Johnson. This well describes the allure that Porcelain for the Emperor holds for historians of the Qing. It is an essential contribution that is best read in conjunction with insights into the visual and technical expertise of bannermen (Kristina Kleutghen), Qing-era crafts (Christine Moll-Murata), material culture (Dorothy Ko), and porcelain manufacture (Anne Gerritsen) in a globalizing world. Enthusiasts of Chinese literature and history might want to spare a few minutes to read through the careful minutiae of the footnotes too.

Within the larger field of history, Porcelain for the Emperor draws attention to a regime that purposefully used porcelain technologies but never considered production the main purpose of the state. Qing bannermen produced technical innovations on demand, but unlike the cameralists in Humboldt's Prussia, that was not their principal aim. As technical experts, the bannermen described by Kai Jun Chen were also highly sensitive to the complex, interconnected, and interactive processes of society and technology, a feature usually found lacking in the profiles of modern technocrats. [2] Sensitive historical reflections are most needed in a period in which some Asian states appeal to Confucian heritage to justify the need for both technical change and social engineering when formulating public policies.

Notes:

[1] Jonathan Spence: Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor: Bondservant and Master, New Haven 1966.

[2] Catherine Jami (ed.): Individual Itineraries and the Spatial Dynamics of Knowledge. Science, Technology and Medicine in China, 17th-20th Centuries, Paris 2017.

[3] Gang Chen: Evolution of Technocracy in P.R. China, in: idem: Political Implications of China's Technocracy in the Reform Era, Cham 2023, 19-36.

Dagmar Schäfer