Modern China: Jingdezhen's Porcelain Industry Copying, Counterfeiting, and Capitalism in Contemporary China

Modern China
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Copying, Counterfeiting, and Capitalism in Contemporary China:

Jingdezhen's Porcelain Industry
Maris Gillette
Modern China 2010 36: 367 originally published online 5 May 2010
DOI: 10.1177/0097700410369880
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Modern China
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Contemporary China:
Jingdezhen’s Porcelain
Industry
Maris Gillette1
Abstract
Eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jingdezhen between 2003 and 2006
revealed that copying and counterfeiting dominated porcelain production.
Ideas about markets and the organization of production encouraged
ceramists to copy and counterfeit in search of profit. At the same time,
producers responded to others’ fraudulent acts by personalizing their
market participation. Their network building was motivated by the belief that
individuals with whom you shared a personal connection would not cheat
you. Ideas about atomized individuals and dishonest markets, on the one
hand, and strategies to personalize market activity, on the other, characterized
contemporary capitalism in Jingdezhen (and perhaps China more broadly).
This contradiction exemplifies a dual process by which capitalism affects how
people think and what they do, while at the same time preexisting ideas and
practices inform how capitalism operates in a particular setting.
Keywords
copying, counterfeiting, capitalism, porcelain, entrepreneurs
1
Haverford College, Haverford, PA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Maris Gillette, Department of Anthropology, Haverford College, Haverford, PA 19041, USA
Email: mgillett@haverford.edu

368 Modern China 36(4)
In July 2005, Christie’s of London sold a fourteenth-century Yuan dynasty jar

(guan) for 27.7 million U.S. dollars. This was the highest price ever received
for any piece of Asian art at auction (http://www.christies.com/departments/
chinese-ceramics-and-works-of-art/). The jar was made in Jingdezhen, a
small city in southeast China known for porcelain production. Painted in
underglaze blue, it depicts a scene from the History of the Warring States
(Zhanguoce) in which a famous military strategist nicknamed Gui Gu Zi
goes to assist the state of Qi (Scott, 2005: 67–68). The painting closely
resembles a woodblock illustration made in Fujian during the 1320s. Only
seven jars of this type, none of which depicted this scene, were known to
exist before this piece was made public. The jar came from the private collec-
tion of a Dutch captain, who bought it in Beijing between 1913 and 1923
(Scott, 2005: 69). Its 2005 purchaser was an anonymous private collector.
In Jingdezhen, news of the sale appears to have first come to the Jiayang
Porcelain Factory. Huang, proprietor of the factory, porcelain appraiser, and
ceramic painter, began producing replicas of the jar. His new ware inspired a
few other local ceramists specializing in the production of Yuan dynasty rep-
licas to make copies too. When, in late October 2005, China Central TV
broadcast a program on antique reproductions that featured one of Huang’s
replicas of the Christie’s jar, ceramists all over Jingdezhen began producing
imitations. Stories about what had happened to Huang’s reproduction circu-
lated widely among porcelain industry workers. Some told me that the
Jiayang Factory sold the jar for 30,000 yuan (US$3,750), and that an auction
house resold it for 40,000 yuan (US$5,000). Others said that Huang’s replica
sold for 200,000 yuan (US$25,000) at auction in England.
Yang, who along with all the other Yuan dynasty replica makers had
started producing jars depicting Gui Gu Zi, was bitter about the television
show. “This was free advertising for the Jiayang Factory,” he said in disgust.
“Now Jiayang will be even more famous, and sell even more pieces.” Yang’s
painter Zhang agreed. “It doesn’t matter whether or not Huang paints the best
Yuan underglaze blue replicas,” she said. “People will buy his pots because
he’s been featured on TV. He’ll make even more money.” Later Wang,
another underglaze blue painter specializing in Yuan replicas, concurred.
“The Jiayang Factory has bought my finished replicas and resold them at
their storefront as Jiayang products,” she told me. “Their sales will go up
after this.”
Copying and counterfeiting dominated Jingdezhen’s porcelain production
in 2005. A set of ideas about markets and a specific organization of produc-
tion encouraged ceramists to copy and counterfeit in search of profit. Industry
workers viewed market relations as impersonal, market actors as privatized,

Gillette 369
and market activity as dishonest and potentially extremely lucrative. They

produced porcelain using a highly specialized, multipart division of labor
that was unregulated by the state. Their ideas and method of ceramics pro-
duction facilitated deceptive behavior. The same producers responded to oth-
ers’ fraudulent acts by trying to work and do business with kin, people who
shared a native place attachment, and former coworkers. This network build-
ing was motivated by the belief that individuals with whom you shared a
personal connection would not cheat you. Ideas about atomized individuals
and dishonest markets, on the one hand, and strategies to personalize market
activity, on the other, characterized contemporary capitalism in Jingdezhen
(and perhaps China more broadly). This contradiction exemplifies a dual pro-
cess by which capitalism affects how people think and what they do, while at
the same time preexisting ideas and practices inform how capitalism operates
in a particular setting.
This article is grounded in eight months of ethnographic fieldwork on the
Jingdezhen porcelain industry between 2003 and 2006. My research included
a five-month apprenticeship in an antique replica workshop; working, relax-
ing, and participating in local events with numerous porcelain producers; and
interviewing current, retired, and laid-off porcelain workers, government
officials, and other Jingdezhen residents. I also studied late imperial Chinese
ceramics in the Smithsonian’s collection, and did English- and Chinese-
language archival and literature research on Jingdezhen and Chinese com-
modity production during a three-month residency at the Freer Gallery of
Art. This textual and collections-based investigation allows me to put con-
temporary copying and counterfeiting in a broader historical and compara-
tive context.
Jingdezhen
Jingdezhen is a small city on the banks of the Chang River in northern Jiangxi
province. Some of the world’s largest and purest deposits of china stone and
kaolin are found here (Wood, 2000). This natural bounty, coupled with avail-
ability of wood and proximity to waterways, enabled the development of an
enormous porcelain industry that in 2005 had been in continuous existence
for a thousand years.
In the Song dynasty (960–1279), potters near Jingdezhen began producing
porcelain that caught the attention of the imperial court and caused the town to
be renamed “the township (zhen) of the Jingde emperor” (reigned 1004–1007).
The local ceramics industry was first subject to official oversight during the
Yuan dynasty (1260–1368), when the government set up a bureau to oversee

what became a major porcelain export business. The wares Jingdezhen ceramists
produced were marketed to the Middle East, Korea, Japan, South Asia, and
Southeast Asia. By the sixteenth century, trade had expanded to Europe and
the Americas. Jingdezhen dominated world ceramics until European potters
finally succeeded in producing porcelain in the eighteenth century and set up
competitor industries (Finlay, 1998; Kerr and Wood, 2004: 709–98).1
The early Ming emperors made Jingdezhen the official supplier of ceram-
ics to the court and established an imperial manufactory that was in operation
from 1369 through the first decade of the twentieth century. Official production
was interrupted during the Ming–Qing transition (mid-seventeenth century)
and the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), but commercial production persisted.
The Republican and socialist governments continued the imperial practice of
direct participation in Jingdezhen’s porcelain manufacturing. After 1958, the
party-state reorganized the industry into ten large state factories, four large
city-run enterprises, and a number of subsidiary collectives under the man-
agement of the government factories. High levels of state control over porce-
lain production continued until 1998, when the reform era government closed
the last ceramic factory operated or managed by the central, provincial, or
city governments, leaving the ceramics industry to private entrepreneurs.
In 2006, the total employed population in Jingdezhen was about 785,000
(Jingdezhen tongji nianjian, 2003). More than half of these working adults
participated in the porcelain industry in some way.2 Many worked as potters,
glazers, and painters, but others made clay, produced the raw materials
required to make clay and glazes, made tools for trimming, built molds, pro-
duced brushes for painting on ceramics, built kilns, made glazes, transported
fired and unfired ceramics between producers and distributors, sold over-
glaze pigment, built boxes for art porcelain, or did other tasks essential to the
industry. More than 90 percent of those working in ceramics were private
entrepreneurs. The rest were employed by joint venture companies or
received partial support from the state. Residents estimated that, of the indus-
try workers who constructed or decorated pots, about 80,000 made contem-
porary art ceramics or antique replicas.
Wares
Between 2003 and 2006 I saw a wide range of art ceramics made in
Jingdezhen. Most were copies of imperial wares. These included Yuan, Ming,
and Qing underglaze blue and underglaze red porcelain, Ming and Qing over-
glazed enameled wares (doucai, wucai, and fencai), late Qing enameled ware
on colored glaze backgrounds, monochrome glazed wares from the Song and

Gillette 371
Qing (including Jun and flambé), and Republican period ceramics. By far the
most commonly reproduced wares were Qing and Republican era underglaze
blue and overglaze enamel pots. Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong period
ceramics were especially popular. I saw a small number of carved and incised
wares. While the majority of ceramists who made antique replicas produced
pots that historically had been made in Jingdezhen, a small minority made
Song dynasty replicas of Longquan, Yaozhou, Ding, Jian, Jun, and Guan
wares as well as the local qingbai (an icy blue, thinly potted Song dynasty
porcelain covered with translucent glaze and decorated with carved incisions).
I also saw replicas of mid-twentieth-century porcelain. Some ceramists repro-
duced the dinnerware pattern commissioned by Mao Zedong (called 7501),
which had originally been made by Jingdezhen’s state-operated Light Industry
Ceramics Research Bureau.
Jingdezhen ceramists also made a range of decorative pieces that locals
called “new style” wares. New style ceramics included porcelain covered
with polychrome glazes that had been developed after the end of the imperial
period, paintings on ceramic tiles, painted vessels, and all sculpture that did
not resemble traditional deity figures. Jingdezhen’s contemporary art porce-
lain ranged in size from the diminutive to the monumental, and included
semi-utilitarian wares, such as hand-built and hand-painted tea pots, as well
as objects whose purpose was decorative. Technology did not determine
whether a piece qualified as new style: one-of-a-kind hand-made pieces and
production wares made from slip-casting (pouring a liquid clay into a plaster
of paris mold) both counted, as long as the wares did not imitate late imperial
porcelain. Judging from what was available on the market, hand-painted tiles
and vessels depicting landscapes, figures, flowers, and animals were the most
popular contemporary ceramic art to produce.
Locals divided porcelain, and especially antique replicas, into low,
medium, and high quality wares. They referred to low quality ceramics as
“mainland Chinese goods” (dalu huo). This phrase marked locals’ belief that
Chinese producers sold the cheapest, worst products to domestic consumers
and the best to international clients. Production techniques largely deter-
mined the quality of a ware. The lowest quality pots were made by slip-
casting. They were often decorated with printed decals. Higher quality wares
were made by hand-pressing clay into molds, throwing on a potter’s wheel,
or slab construction. Medium and high level porcelain were hand painted.
Some industry workers told me that the quality of the painting was what
determined whether a hand-made pot was graded average or excellent. Firing
could also affect how locals evaluated the quality of a ware. Most porcelain
in Jingdezhen was fired in gas (propane) kilns, but some of the finest antique

replicas were fired in wood-burning kilns, to imitate more closely the process
used in imperial times. In 2005 there were three wood-burning kilns in
Jingdezhen, all licensed by the government. There were also wood-burning
kilns in southern Anhui province, and some Jingdezhen producers trans-
ported unfired ceramics there.3
Production and Distribution

Makers of antique replicas and art porcelain were found all over Jingdezhen.
Small workshops were scattered all over the city. Several sites, many of them
former villages that had been absorbed into the city, were specifically known as
locations for antique replica producers. Most antique replica makers ran work-
shops in their homes, and employed five or fewer employees. Contemporary
art producers tended to have even smaller operations.
Most entrepreneurs directly involved in producing pots focused on either
construction or decoration. For example, Shao specialized in making unfin-
ished fired “white wares” (bai tai) in the shape of late Qing cloisonné. He and
his brother hand-pressed clay into molds, and a woman who had been one of
the brothers’ former coworkers in a collective porcelain factory made decora-
tive pieces (such as clay rings) that went on some of the pieces. Shao paid the
owner of a commercial kiln to fire his pots. Shao sold some of his “white
wares” to Jiang, an entrepreneur who painted ceramics with overglaze enam-
els. She and her three employees copied the late Republican style, specializ-
ing in vessels with patterns such as vines or scrolls. Jiang hired other painters
to decorate wares with birds, flowers, or dragons. She sold her wares to por-
celain distributors or directly to consumers.
Porcelain entrepreneurs hired workers on a long-term or ad hoc basis. An
industry worker specialized in production technique, style, and period. For
example, Hu was a thrower who made new style art vessels such as vases and
jars. Hu did not know how to hand-press, slip-cast, or build wares from slabs,
and he never threw shapes that could be used for antique replicas. Similarly,
porcelain painters had specialties (e.g., in human figures, animals, dragons,
flowers, or landscapes) and concentrated on a particular style (such as Yuan
dynasty underglaze painting). Painters worked in either underglaze or over-
glaze pigment but not both.4
High-end antique replica producers were the ceramists most likely to have
comprehensive workshops, where construction, decoration, glazing, and fir-
ing took place under a single roof.5 The proprietors of high quality replica
businesses personally oversaw each stage of the production process to ensure
quality. Key moments were making the clay, glaze, and underglaze pigment;

Gillette 373
firing; and aging. Many of these entrepreneurs also participated in other parts
of production. My apprenticeship was in the workshop of a high-end antique
replica producer named Yang. I mainly studied how to throw pots, but I also
helped Yang mix clay, wedge clay, transport unfired pots, trim thrown wares,
sharpen trimming tools, glaze, mix underglaze pigment, and decorate in
underglaze blue. I was allowed to observe (but not participate) as Yang made
clay, glaze, and aging solution, built molds and models, and fired wares.
In addition to private entrepreneurs, local institutions such as the Light
Industry Ceramics Research Bureau and the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute
made art ceramics. These institutions had some degree of state support. Most
of the ceramics produced at the Light Industry Ceramics Research Bureau
were contemporary art porcelain. The bureau also reproduced wares that it
had made for the government in the 1960s and 1970s (such as Mao’s special
7501 pattern) as well as some late imperial porcelain.6 The Jingdezhen
Ceramics Institute was similar. Teachers and students made a small quantity
of antique replicas but devoted themselves to producing new art. When I
asked Zhang, an instructor at the Ceramics Institute, about the porcelain that
teachers and students made, she stated that the school focused on “creating”
(chuangzuo) rather than “copying.” However, Liu, a private replica maker,
told me that the Institute produced contemporary art for other reasons.
“Professors at the Ceramics Institute do not have a deep understanding of
traditional ceramics,” he said. “They lack the skills necessary to make high
quality reproductions.”
Most ceramists worked to order. Producers had long-term customers who
placed orders by phone or in person and collected their orders at the work-
shop. Mainly private sellers commissioned wares, but occasionally institu-
tions such as museums ordered pieces. During my fieldwork in 2005, Beijing’s
Palace Museum, the Shanghai Art Museum, and the Nanyang Museum
ordered copies of historic wares from the Jiayang factory and other local pro-
ducers. Some of these wares were inscribed for the institutional recipient
(e.g., “Shanghai Art Museum”), and some were given period foot inscriptions
(e.g., “made in the Yongzheng period of the Qing dynasty”).
Porcelain entrepreneurs made a small proportion of wares for casual sales.
Those with storefronts often sold porcelain that they themselves did not pro-
duce, in addition to pots they had made (or partly made) themselves. If a
customer asked about these wares, the entrepreneur would claim that she had
made them, to deter the customer from looking elsewhere. I heard ceramists
scoff at buyers who believed that a single producer could make a wide range of
ware types. “Who could possibly make that many different kinds of ceramics,”
Wu, a painter, remarked.

A History of Copying in Jingdezhen

Copying was not a new phenomenon in Jingdezhen’s ceramic industry. When
local ceramists first made high-fired wares in the tenth century, they pro-
duced green-glazed pots that imitated stoneware from the Yue kilns in
Zhejiang, and white wares that mimicked porcelain from the Ding kilns in
North China (Kerr and Wood, 2004: 201). The icy-blue qingbai (or yingqing)
porcelain that caught the Song Jingde emperor’s attention, and began
Jingdezhen’s 990-year history of state intervention in ceramics, emulated
northern and southern high-fired ceramics with incised and impressed pat-
terns and translucent glazes, such as pots made at Yaozhou in Shaanxi and
Cizhou in Hebei (the Boston Museum of Fine Arts qingbai tea bowl 12.1165
in Wu, 2001: 78–79, shows these qualities very well).
Some copying in Jingdezhen was at the state’s behest. The earliest known
imperial order for Jingdezhen porcelain workers to imitate ceramics from
other kilns and periods dates to the fifteenth century (Scott, 1992: 80; Kerr
and Wood, 2004: 30, 572).7 The Chenghua emperor (1465–1487) ordered
Jingdezhen ceramists to make exact reproductions of wares that Jingdezhen
producers had made during the Xuande period (1425–1435). Some of these
Chenghua-period replicas were inscribed with Xuande reign marks (Harrison-
Hall, 2001: 570; Pierson, 2004: 8).
Commercial kilns also reproduced imperial wares, perhaps as early as
1426, and certainly during the sixteenth century (Luo, 2004: 29–30).
Historical documents record the names of individual Jingdezhen potters who
excelled at copying Yongle, Xuande, Chenghua, and Ding wares during the
mid and late Ming (Luo, 2005: 100). These replicas have inscriptions from
the period when they were made, and from the period being copied (Harrison-
Hall, 2001: 569).
Not all copying in Jingdezhen was of ceramics from other kilns and other
periods. Jingdezhen porcelain workers copied bronze forms (see, e.g., Kerr and
Wood, 2004: 208, fig. 48; Harrison-Hall, 2001: 422, fig. 13:26; Scott, 1992; Wu,
2001: 134–35), Persian silver work (Finlay, 1998: 147–48), jade (e.g., F1911.348
in the Freer Gallery of Art), lacquer (see Scott, 1992: 91, fig. 27), cameo glass
(Pierson, 2002), and a range of natural media such as wood, stone, edibles, and
live objects (Hobson, [1915] 1976, vol. 1: xxiii; Scott, 1992: 88–90). A 1743
text written by the director of the imperial manufactory at Jingdezhen indicates
that Ming decorators imitated surface designs on embroidery and silk (Tang,
[1743] 1983: 154). Jingdezhen porcelain painters also copied the ink paintings
on paper produced by literati (e.g., Chen, 2004: 25; Howard, 1997: fig. 357;
Pierson, 2001: 52, fig. 47, fig. 50; see also Stuart, 1995).

Gillette 375
Jingdezhen’s high period for porcelain copies of all sorts was the eighteenth
century (Luo, 2005: 100). Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong ceramists made
direct copies of Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasty wares, including mono-
chromes, underglaze red wares, underglaze blue wares, and enameled wares
(Chen, 2004: 25; Harrison-Hall, 2001: 569; Kerr, 1992: 162; Kerr and Wood,
2004: 30; Luo, 2005: 101; Pierson, 2004: 13). The Yongzheng emperor estab-
lished what Kerr and Wood describe as “a true experimental glaze laboratory
at Ching-te-chen [Jingdezhen], where very convincing ceramic copies of
carved lacquer, burnished bronze and rare handstones were made” (2004:
608). Extensive cross-fertilization between painting and ceramics also char-
acterized eighteenth-century porcelain production (Stuart, 1995: 38–41).
Commercial antique reproductions could be as precise as those made in the
imperial manufactory, to the point that some eighteenth-century commercial
porcelain cannot be differentiated from imperial ceramics (Luo, 2004: 30;
Kerr and Wood, 2004: 200).
Many art historians and dealers regard replicas from the Ming and Qing
dynasties as a tribute to the art of the past and a demonstration of technological
skill, rather than the production of fakes intended to deceive (Harrison-Hall,
2001: 570; Lee, 1949: 3; Freedman, 1996: 34–35; Kerr, 1986: 44; Luo, 2005:
103). However, at least one man is known to have produced counterfeit antiques
in Jingdezhen during the Ming: a potter, restorer, dealer, painter, faker, Daoist,
and later Buddhist monk named Zhou Danquan (Clunas, 1991: 50; Kerr and
Wood, 2004: 33; Hobson, 1915, vol. 1: 95). Zhou was active during the
Longqing and Wanli periods (1567–1620). One of his forgeries, a reproduction
of a Song dynasty Ding ware incense burner, was so successful that a major
connoisseur of the day was unable to differentiate it from the original (Hobson,
1915, v. 1: 95). The connoisseur bought Zhou’s reproduction in appreciation
for his skill, and his grandson later sold it as a Song original (Clunas, 1991: 51).
During the late Qing and Republican period (1911–1949), China hosted a
larger foreign population than it had previously, due in part to the European
and Japanese colonization of Chinese territory in the mid-nineteenth century.
Many foreigners collected antique Chinese ceramics (Harrison-Hall, 2001:
570; Luo, 2005: 101–2). The dispersal of the imperial collections, through
looting by British, French, and American troops after sacking the Summer
Palace in 1900, sales on behalf of the emperor, and theft by palace employ-
ees, stimulated foreign collecting, provided more materials for Jingdezhen
ceramists to copy, and created opportunities for selling counterfeits that
purported to be from the emperor’s collection.
The turn of the twentieth century saw an upsurge in the production of
antique replicas (Freedman, 1996: 35; Luo, 2005: 101; Jones, 1990: 100;

Wain, 2005: 89). Expert appraisers collaborated with porcelain workers to

create highly accurate imitations and forgeries. During the 1920s and 1930s,
commercial potters in Jingdezhen were commissioned by Shanghai dealers to
make high quality counterfeit antiques, both replicas and wares in new styles
that purported to be from earlier periods (Howard, 1997: 256 and fig. 354, 355,
356; see also Luo, 2005: 101, Harrison-Hall, 2001: 571). Beijing was also a
market for Jingdezhen counterfeits. Copying was not limited to porcelain from
antiquity: President Yuan Shikai’s Jurentang and Hongxian ceramics were
being copied five years after his death (Wain, 2005: 89).
Two Western specialists in Chinese ceramics, R. L. Hobson and A. D.
Brankston, personally witnessed Jingdezhen’s counterfeiting in the early
twentieth century and wrote descriptions of what they saw. On his 1937 visit
to Jingdezhen, Brankston saw locals using shards from the imperial manufac-
tory to make reproductions (Brankston, [1938] 1982: 57). Prior to 1915,
Hobson saw porcelain workers who made antique reproductions; repaired
and/or redecorated old pots and sold them as original antiques; and removed
the correct reign dates of eighteenth-century reproductions of Song and Yuan
pots and replaced them with spurious ones (Hobson, 1915, v. 2: 304–7).
Hobson wrote that Jingdezhen’s best early twentieth-century copies were of
Kangxi overglaze enameled ware and monochromes; the Ming reproductions
were “indifferent” and inferior to contemporary Japanese replicas (306).
Jingdezhen ceramists made far fewer copies and counterfeits during the
Maoist period (1949–1976).8 The Chinese Communist Party nationalized
the porcelain industry in the late 1950s. Small “experimental” work teams at
the Build the Nation Porcelain Factory and the Art Porcelain Factory used
handicraft methods to make a limited quantity of traditional porcelain (Fang,
2000: 44). Large-scale production was devoted to daily use porcelain (din-
nerware, household items) and ceramics for engineering and electrical use.
Quite a few Jingdezhen residents told me that it was illegal to make
antique replicas during the Cultural Revolution. Shu, a Jingdezhen city offi-
cial who came to Jingdezhen from Shanghai in 1969 as part of the xiafang
movement, wrote a book about Jingdezhen’s history of ceramic production
based on research that he directed for the government. Shu told me that dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution certain traditional patterns of surface decoration
and porcelain deity statues were considered feudal, capitalist, revisionist, and
counterrevolutionary. However, small-scale handicraft production never
ceased completely, and a few factories completed government commissions
for antique reproductions.
Significant levels of copying reemerged on Jingdezhen’s ceramic scene
when some residents turned to reproducing historic wares in the 1980s. Luo

Gillette 377
Xuezheng claimed to have founded private production of antique replicas in

Jingdezhen in 1984. When a Beijing exporter convinced Luo that a market
for antique replicas existed, Luo tried but failed to persuade his work unit to
reproduce historic wares. So he and four or five others opened a private fac-
tory to produce antique replicas for export. Luo and his partners studied
archaeological evidence and used old technologies, such as stick-spun pot-
ter’s wheels, to imitate traditional porcelain. They hired ceramists who had
learned to pot and paint before the 1950s. When the government decreed that
state employees could not work in after-hours businesses in 1985, Luo and
his partners were forced to sell the factory. Xiang, a rural migrant who was
working for Luo, bought the enterprise, and has owned it ever since. Luo
remained affiliated as an advisor.
The vast majority of replica producers got into the business when the
government closed all state and collective porcelain enterprises in the
mid-1990s.9 New migrants from the countryside, state and collective factory
workers who had lost their jobs, and locals whose bad class labels had pre-
vented them from getting regular employment in work units all turned to
making antique replicas. Initially, the most popular type of ware to copy was
qingbai. By 2003, when I first visited Jingdezhen, underglaze blue and over-
glaze enamel replicas of Qing porcelain dominated the market.
By and large, constructing and painting art porcelain were activities for
the young. Industry workers thought that potters were losing the strength
needed to work in clay by their mid-30s, and that painters’ eyesight grew
weaker and their hands unsteady. Yang, who began making Yuan replicas at
the age of 16, exemplifies the youthfulness of the art porcelain sector. Yang
opened his own workshop to produce Yuan dynasty replicas in May 2005,
when he was 24. During the five months that I apprenticed in his enterprise,
I never saw anyone older than the age of 30 working there.
Copying a Pot
Reference Materials
Painters and potters all used “reference materials” (cankaoshu). Locals used
this term to refer to books on ceramics (catalogues, exhibition materials,
scholarly books); photographs of pots taken in museums, exhibitions, and
private collections; photographs of ceramics found on the internet; pamphlets
with drawings of pots; shards; and original contemporary and historic wares.
The city had several bookstores and book markets that sold volumes on
ceramics, and an “information seller” who had a shop near the city center.

She sold photographs of historic ceramics, photographs of wares in other

media (such as cloisonné or bronze) that ceramic workers reproduced in
porcelain, books, and pamphlets.
Jingdezhen’s Ceramic Museum was a resource for makers of antique rep-
licas. Locals visited the museum to look at the pots on display, which included
Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing wares made in Jingdezhen. If a replica producer
knew an employee of the museum, she could handle a pot and examine it
more closely. I was told that some people had been allowed to take pieces out
of the museum to their workshops. Producers also borrowed wares from the
private Hutian Museum, located just outside the city proper.
Makers of contemporary ceramics turned to exhibitions of contemporary
art, art fairs, and art contests as resources for imitation. The Jingdezhen Ceramic
Institute and the Light Industry Ceramics Research Bureau had exhibition
halls where the ceramists employed by these institutions displayed their work.
The city government organized an annual ceramics fair where national and
international contemporary art ceramists, replica makers, and dinnerware pro-
ducers displayed their goods. The city also operated an exhibition hall at the
International Ceramics Market in downtown Jingdezhen. Two private, for-
profit organizations, the Sanbao Working Ceramics Village (located on the
outskirts of the city) and the Le Tian Pottery Workshop, had display areas and
organized events where ceramists could present and discuss their work. Both
of these sites regularly hosted foreign ceramists. Jingdezhen producers of con-
temporary art porcelain took advantage of these opportunities to examine,
photograph, and sketch the work of other ceramists.
Antique replica makers sometimes owned originals and original shards.
Some purchased antiques, but many had found them. Construction sites in
and around the city almost always yielded shards, and replica makers visited
these areas to look for reference materials. Juanjuan, a painter, told me that
during the 1990s there had been a lot of private excavation in Jingdezhen,
especially near the imperial manufactory. Locals dug holes and tunnels to
look for pots and shards. City officials only put a stop to private excavation
when some tunnels collapsed and people died. This activity was one reason
why the government decided to fund an official excavation.10
Figuring the Dimensions of an Antique Replica

Ceramists who copied contemporary art did not always try to create exact
replicas of the wares they imitated. Indeed, many insisted that they modified
the works they copied (such modifications were often very small). By con-
trast, producers who made antique replicas—and especially those who made

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high-end wares—felt that their sales depended on their ability to reproduce

originals closely. A high-end replica maker would copy the exact dimensions
of an antique and faithfully imitate its surface decoration. I frequently
watched Yang determine the dimensions of pots during my apprenticeship.
The captions of published photographs of Chinese ceramics include a
description of one dimension of the pot (e.g., “height 12 centimeters”). Yang
recorded this information, and then measured the size of the pot in the photo-
graph to determine the scale of the image in relation to the actual form. He
used a mathematical formula to figure out the remaining dimensions of the
ware. Next, he made a clay model of the pot. This model was slightly bigger
than the original, because clay shrinks during drying and firing. Once the
model was completed, Yang used it to make a mold of the pot in plaster of
paris. When the mold was dry, he produced forms by hand-pressing clay into
the mold.
Painting
Most contemporary ceramic painters copied another ceramist’s surface design
by looking at a photograph of the original while they were painting. Most did
not worry about making a precise copy, since a replica of contemporary art
did not have to be an exact copy to sell. Ceramists understood new style art
to be more spontaneous than traditional art. A painter was supposed to be
“following her feelings” when she produced an object.
Painters who decorated antique replicas did part of the work by sketching
and part by pouncing or using a stencil. Painters drew simple designs and
repetitive motifs such as lotus scrolls or banana leaves. They used pouncing
for complex designs and when they wanted to work more quickly. Designs
for pouncing were made from a photocopy of a photograph of an original
enlarged to the correct size. A painter or apprentice would place a piece of
clear plastic or graph paper underneath the photocopy and poke holes through
the lines of the painted design. This transferred the image to the plastic or
graph paper. Next the painter positioned the stencil over the pot and sponged
ink through the holes to make an outline on the ware. She then painted on the
stenciled design with underglaze pigment.
Whereas the original maker of a ware painted in his own style, reproduc-
ers emulated another painter. Copying made for stiffer brush strokes and a
more emaciated style. Sometimes locals criticized replicas for having “dead”
painting. A good painter had to capture the vigor and spontaneity of the origi-
nal while still replicating the design. Yang and his painters Zhang and
Juanjuan told me that ceramics from some periods were easier to paint than

others. The freehand style of Yuan ceramic painting was harder to copy than
the formal, standardized patterns on Qing pots. “The brush strokes on Yuan
porcelain are vigorous,” Yang said. “Yuan painters were very carefree, they
followed their desires.” The “design” sense of Qing underglaze wares was
much easier to replicate.
Some antique replicas needed inscriptions on their base to look authentic
(this practice began in China in the mid-fifteenth century). I knew a man
named Cao who inscribed marks on the bottom of pots for a living. Cao had
done a lot of calligraphy when he was young, and during the Cultural
Revolution was often selected to write propaganda materials for his work
unit. When the state enterprise porcelain factory where Cao worked went
bankrupt, he turned to reproducing foot inscriptions. Cao traveled between
workshops, earning 2,000 to 3,000 yuan (US$250–$375) each month—four
to six times as much as a hotel attendant, but one fifth of what a good thrower
could make.
Firing, Aging, and Defects

Makers of high quality replicas paid close attention to firing. They emulated
kiln temperatures appropriate to the period whose wares they reproduced.11 A
few found ways to use wood-burning kilns, because most Jingdezhen historic
wares had been fired in wood burning kilns. For example, I knew a maker of
Ming replicas who had a small zhen kiln (the traditional Jingdezhen-style kiln)
that he fired once a month, at a cost of 10,000 yuan (about US$1,250) per
firing. If a producer did not own a wood-firing kiln, and did not have an associ-
ate who did, she had to transport her wares to southern Anhui for wood firing
(where air pollution control measures were less stringent). Producers who were
not willing to adopt such extreme measures compensated by building specially
constructed propane kilns that mimicked the effects of a wood-firing kiln.
Replica makers generally believed that customers wanted to buy pots that
looked antique. As one ceramist stated, “Replicas are supposed to look like
something from long ago. You have to age them to make them look right.”
Another said simply, “Customers like to buy pots that look old.” Replica
producers knew that their wares were likely to be resold as antiques, and they
aged their pots to facilitate the resale. Reproductions from earlier periods
required different aging techniques than those from later periods. Yang
explained that the glazes on Yuan pots looked more like jade and were less
glassy than the glazes on later wares, and he adjusted his aging recipe accord-
ingly. There were fewer changes to porcelain from the Qing since less time
had elapsed.

Gillette 381
Producers used a variety of techniques for aging. Many used acid, but I
also saw dye, traditional Chinese medicine, shoe polish, and tea. Some rep-
lica makers beat their pots with a hard substance or rubbed them with sand-
paper. Many ceramists adhered dirt-like substances to their wares to make the
pots appear to have been “buried for centuries.” As one man explained, most
antiques in China were excavated, so customers were more likely to buy pots
that had dirt or fake dirt on their surface. Sometimes producers stuck a piece
of a genuine antique to a pot they had made. For example, I watched one man
using an electric sander to shape a porcelain shard. He glued the shard to the
foot of one of his pots. If someone took a core sample from the base of this
piece (the usual site for core samples, as the base of a pot is less visible), the
pot would test “correctly” as being fired in the proper historical period.
Producers of high-end replicas copied the defects of historical wares.
For example, a ceramist working in underglaze blue made some gray pig-
ment as well, because historical pots sometimes had less-desirable gray
shades. Other defects, such as glaze shrinking, crawling, and leaving parts
of the pot unglazed, were also imitated. A good producer evaluated her
replicas when they came out of the kiln to see whether the defects on the
pots conformed with the defects appropriate to the period. For example,
Yang discarded a number of his Yuan replicas because they had unpopped
air bubbles in the glaze. If the bubbles had popped and left small holes, he
could have sold the wares, but the ones with the bubbles were “useless”
because the defect was not characteristic of the period. Yang responded by
adjusting his glaze recipe.
Copying and Competition

Locals agreed that the range of wares sold in Jingdezhen was limited. Industry
workers blamed customers who were “conservative” and “uninterested in
new products” (buhao jieshou). At the same time, many ceramists believed
that you had to be the first person to produce a ware if you were to make a
profit. Entrepreneurs sought to make a ware that no one else made but would
be welcomed by consumers, or to have special techniques that made their
pots distinctive and so better sellers. They found this to be impossible. “As
soon as you put out a new product, someone will copy it (fang ta),” Hong
assured me. “Copying saves effort,” she said. “You know that all the materi-
als you need to produce the ware are available locally, because someone else
is making it. And you can’t keep wares unique even if you want to. People
see what you make and they immediately copy it. This is why people find it
so hard to make money anymore.”

Locals emphasized that Jingdezhen was filled with highly skilled workers
who could copy a ware after a single viewing. Competitors visited others’
storefronts and examined pots under pretext of being customers. After they
left they produced what they saw in their own workshops. Ceramists some-
times pointed out to me visitors who they thought were competitors, and I
saw producers refusing to sell pots to such individuals. For example, Xu
turned down a potential customer one afternoon because she believed he
intended to use her piece to copy her form. “You can’t stop people from
copying your painting,” she said, “but you don’t want to let them reproduce
your form. My jars sell better than other producers’ because my form is bet-
ter.” Locals also identified commercial kilns, where proprietors rented kiln
space to ceramists who needed pots fired, as places where producers saw one
another’s products and figured out how to reproduce them.
The organization of production facilitated copying. Since most porcelain
workers specialized in one aspect of ceramics, proprietors often hired workers
to help make pots. Some locals’ main employment was as ad hoc laborers.
Others had jobs in workshops but did piece work in their off hours. For exam-
ple, Yang often hired Wang, a painter at the Jiayang Factory, to paint his rep-
licas for him. Wang came to Yang’s workshop in the evenings, on weekends,
and on his days off from the factory. Workers like Wang transmitted informa-
tion about what other ceramists were doing. They sold their labor rather than
pots, and so had no interest in preventing a ware from being replicated.
The city government did little to alleviate ceramists’ worries about com-
petition and copying. One official explained to me that the government did
not want to regulate copying because so many people made money from
reproducing others’ works. City officials prioritized raising everyone’s stan-
dard of living over giving producers exclusive rights to make wares. Copying
had positive consequences for Jingdezhen’s economic development, he said.
Some locals told me that you could apply for an official copyright on your
products. The process was time-consuming and expensive, and the govern-
ment did nothing to enforce copyrights. If an individual producer found
someone who reproduced her wares, she could bring that person to the gov-
ernment’s attention and the person would be fined. Most ceramists felt that
time spent looking for and prosecuting copyists was less remunerative than
time spent on production.
During the collective period, factories held monopolies on particular
wares by state decree. Only one or two enterprises in Jingdezhen were
licensed to produce a particular pattern. This regulation ceased when the gov-
ernment withdrew from direct intervention in production. In addition, priva-
tization put a stop to virtually all funding for research and development. The

Gillette 383
government no longer invested, and private entrepreneurs focused on short-term

profits. In 2005, the limited innovation that occurred was closely related to
existing products: a new glaze, a modified form or decoration, another type
of antique to replicate. These kinds of changes did little to open up new mar-
ket areas. In the absence of state regulation and large-scale investment in
research, imitation emerged as a key way to make money.
Many local ceramists tried to prevent others from copying their wares by
“hiding” production. Producers claimed they would only let relatives or busi-
ness associates into their workshops. I heard stories about painters who put
down their brushes whenever they heard someone approach. Proprietors kept
key information about their products to themselves. For example, in his
workshop Yang was the only one who knew the recipes for his clay, glaze,
and underglaze pigments. He refused to allow others to observe him mixing
the proportions of ceramic materials. When Yang finally allowed me to
watch, he made me promise not to write down details about what I saw. Yang
stated emphatically that he needed to keep his recipes secret to protect himself
from competition.
Producers talked extensively about their fears of being copied, but never
admitted to copying someone else. On one occasion when I visited Zhou’s
workshop, he was painting a pot that I thought looked a lot like the pots made
by his neighbor Song. When I said this, Zhou shushed me. “Shh, you can’t
say that,” he hissed. “You can’t talk about these things. Some things have to
be hidden. Some things are taboo in the porcelain business.” On a separate
occasion, Zhou told me that he always modified the pieces he imitated, to
make the work his own. On that day, for example, Zhou was copying a
ceramic painting of a school of carp. Zhou modified his piece by painting
nine carp rather than the original six.
Unlike imperial times, when ceramic workers belonged to guilds and
native place associations, contemporary porcelain workers had no unions,
occupational associations, or interest groups. Some of their determination not
to share resources related to their stories of big sales. People believed that an
entrepreneur had to be the first producer of a ware to get rich.
“Everything I Know I Taught Myself ”

One institution where knowledge was transmitted between porcelain workers
was apprenticeship. An apprentice received some instruction from her master.
For example, when I first arrived in Jingdezhen, my master showed me how
to wedge clay (a technique to remove air bubbles). After he demonstrated
once, I practiced over and over. Occasionally Yang corrected me, or watched

and commented on what I was doing. After I had been wedging for a while,
he demonstrated again.
In 2005, many producers had their apprentices do tedious, repetitive jobs
that were important for production but did not help the apprentice develop all
the skills that she needed to become a ceramist.12 For example, Wu had her
apprentice make stencils for pouncing. I never saw the apprentice painting or
doing other aspects of production. Some ceramists said that they did not want
to take apprentices because they did not want to share their techniques or
skills (although others took many apprentices because they were paid to
“teach” them, or because they benefited from apprentices’ participation in
production). As Yang pointed out, after a person completed her apprentice-
ship, she entered the market and worked for herself. Training an apprentice
ultimately meant training the competition.
Porcelain workers complained that their masters did not train them
enough. Juanjuan commented to me that as far as she was concerned, being
an apprentice had been a waste of time. “My master never taught us appren-
tices anything. He just made us do work around the workshop. He kept say-
ing that we could earn some money when we made wares that sold, but he
never showed us anything.”
A common saying among industry workers, particularly potters and paint-
ers, was “I taught myself to paint/throw/do everything in ceramics.” Most
producers told me that they had learned ceramics from someone, usually a
relative, but they also told me that they had “completely depended on them-
selves” to learn what they did. Apprenticing was “standing behind someone
else’s butt,” as Yang put it. To really learn how to throw, paint, press wares
into molds, or do other tasks, you “relied on yourself.”
A Way to Earn a Living

Anthropologist Stuart Plattner describes artists in St. Louis who were ambiv-
alent about selling their wares (Plattner, 1996: chaps. 4–7). These artists saw
themselves as devoted to a calling, realizing a dream, and materializing their
artistic genius. They did not think of their art as commodities. Jingdezhen
porcelain producers did. Most were in ceramics to earn a living and if possi-
ble get rich. Few had artistic goals.
Most porcelain producers did not love what they did. When I asked cera-
mists what they thought about porcelain, many said that they “had no feel-
ings” about it. A number said that they had seen too much and were sick of it.
Zhou, a seller of overglaze pigments who had previously painted porcelain,
told me that local people had “absolutely no interest in ceramics.” Shao

Gillette 385
remarked that “Only outsiders think porcelain is profound (shen ao). We who
live here are sick of it.”
Several porcelain producers explained that ceramics was how they made
a living. Liu and Wu told me that they felt lukewarm about porcelain, but
they “depended on it to exist” (kao ta shengcun). “I feel lucky to have the
skill of painting on porcelain,” Wu said. “It means I’m independent. I can
make a living.” Other producers expressed similar sentiments. “Porcelain is
my livelihood,” Xu said.
This is true for most of us here. We depend on porcelain to live. We

don’t admire it or have deep knowledge about it. Many of us can’t dis-
tinguish between a replica and an original antique. And when we look
at a replica we can’t tell you what period is being imitated.
Several locals explained that Jingdezhen offered only a few potential career
paths. Most of what was available was related to porcelain. Young women felt
especially constrained. “In Jingdezhen, if you are female, there are only a few
jobs open to you,” Gong, a former surface decorator, explained. “You can
stand behind a counter in a shop. You can be a maid or attendant. Or you can
decorate porcelain. That’s it. If you’re a female there is nothing else for you
here.” Gong told me that the employment situation grew worse as you aged.
Women older than 30 years were too old for jobs as shop attendants or hotel
staff. They had no choice but to work in porcelain production if they wanted
employment, and were limited to applying decals or other menial tasks.
Ceramists agreed that you could support yourself in porcelain production.
“You won’t starve to death,” as Yang put it. I heard over and over again the
statement that you could eat from making porcelain (fen fan chi, you fan chi,
you chi fan de qian). However, producers insisted that making a profit was
hard. Few ever admitted to making a big sale, although everyone enjoyed
talking about how much money someone else made. For example, when
Wu returned from an exposition in Shanghai, I asked her how she had done.
“I didn’t take a big loss and I didn’t strike it rich,” she said. “But my neigh-
bor, he did really well. He sold everything he brought!” Liu, who had also
gone to the exposition, had a different impression. “Wu sold quite a few
pieces,” Liu told me. “She definitely earned some cash on this trip.”
Prices
Bargaining was common in Jingdezhen. Almost all market transactions
included some kind of negotiation over price. The only exceptions were

buying cooked food and buying goods at the city’s supermarkets. I never
witnessed or participated in a sale of porcelain that did not include an effort
on the part of the consumer to get the seller to lower the price. Buyers regu-
larly claimed that the wares they were trying to buy were poor quality, inferior
to the products of other producers, inaccurate imitations, or flawed in some
way. After listening to one loud, protracted exchange between a ceramist and
a group of five customers (three men and two women), I asked Jiang how she
felt about such altercations. “We’re used to it,” she said to me. “At first I
found it challenging, but now I know better. These people will say anything
to drive your price down. You can’t pay attention to them.”13
In general, customers wanted at least a little discount on a purchase before
they would buy it. This was true regardless of the price of the pot. “Customers
like to feel as if they have made a good buy,” Wu stated. Based on what I
observed, a customer who succeeded in talking a price down was more likely
to purchase the piece. The dynamics of the interaction, which included the
apparent capitulation of the seller—who almost certainly began with a price
that was far above what she thought she could get for the piece—made cus-
tomers feel they had gotten a deal.
Several ceramists told me that they thought that bargaining diminished the
value of pots. Some felt that bargaining was what low-end replica makers
did, people who sold in quantity and made inferior wares. Bargaining had
“messed up” the porcelain market, several said. These producers argued that
the price of a pot should be fixed, because its value was inherent. “A piece of
porcelain is worth what it is worth,” Zhang told me. “That should not be
negotiable.”
Consumer Ignorance
Most porcelain workers complained about consumer ignorance. Many pro-
ducers felt that customers could not differentiate between high and low
quality work. They believed that their customers (most of whom were redis-
tributors) had no appreciation for art and no awareness of the technical skills
involved in making porcelain. Entrepreneurs said that buyers bought known
quantities—wares made by ceramists whose name or factory they had heard
of, and pots that were easily identifiable as representing a particular period or
style—because they knew so little about ceramics.
Zhang, a glaze inventor, contrasted the contemporary porcelain industry
with the Ming and Qing period. He pointed out that the imperial court was an
educated and highly discriminating consumer with a broad palate and an
insatiable appetite for new pieces. “Today’s consumers are uneducated about

Gillette 387
porcelain and narrow in the repertoire of what they will buy,” Zhang told me.
“They have little education and a low cultural level.” Zhang felt that these
consumer traits promoted high levels of imitation among porcelain producers
and a market dominated by antique replicas.
Locals agreed that well-known producers made more money for their
wares, regardless of whether or not their pots were the best painted or con-
structed. For example, Huang’s factory was a regular stop for organized tours
and frequently visited by official delegations. His showroom displayed por-
celain from his factory that had won prizes in state-sponsored competitions.
Many replica makers said that Huang sold his reproductions for more money
because potential buyers had heard of him. He and other renowned replica
makers “sold their fame” (mai mingqi).
Deception
Tales of deceptive business practices flew fast and thick around Jingdezhen’s
porcelain market. In addition to the word “deceive” or “lie” (pian), locals had
another phrase that they used when talking about taking advantage of
customers: shazhu or “kill the pig.”
On one occasion when I was at Yang’s workshop, Yang was making a
replica for a customer. The customer was present, and he asked me about
the pot that Yang was copying. It was a large jug made from an iron-rich
body with a Guan-style cracked glaze on it, and it had a broken neck. “Do
you think it is real or fake?” he asked. Based on how the piece looked, I
thought that it had not been made in the Guan kilns. It could have been a
nineteenth-century Jingdezhen imitation of Guan wares, but something
made me suspect it was not an antique. “I think it might be fake,” I said.
The man told me that an original antique like that piece had sold for
US$30,000.
After the customer left I asked Yang what he thought about the jug. Yang
was fairly certain that the piece was not genuine, but had not offered his
opinion. Yang had agreed to make a mold from which replicas could be pro-
duced, and to repair the neck on the jug before he made the mold so the pot
would appear to be whole. Yang told me that the customer and his wife were
going to sell the original jug and the replicas as genuine antiques. “They are
going to kill the pig,” he said.
One of Jiang’s subletters was a man who restored and augmented antiques
by changing their glaze, adding decorations or inscriptions, or making
ceramic repairs. This practice was called “working on old porcelain bodies”
(lao tai jia gong) and a number of people in Jingdezhen sold such pieces.

Jiang’s subletter explained that he used books with photographs of historic

wares to “prove” that the pots he sold were antiques. “Many customers will
accept that a pot is an antique if they see a photograph of it in a book,” he told
me. “I kill the pig for a living.”
Locals agreed that selling a replica as an antique was shazhu. They had
different opinions about the extent to which producing replicas should be
considered deception. For example, Luo insisted that there was an important
distinction between antique replicas (fangguci) and counterfeits (yanpin). In
his eyes, if you sold a ware as a replica, you were engaging in a legitimate
business practice. “Producers of historic reproductions are not deceiving
anyone,” Luo said firmly. “They are filling orders. There is nothing wrong
with that. It is the people who are making counterfeits who are doing something
reprehensible.”
When I mentioned this conversation to Yang, he strongly disagreed with
Luo’s distinction. “Antique replicas are counterfeits (fangguci jiu shi yanpin),”
Yang stated. “People who make replicas do it so they can sell their wares as
authentic. It is the authentic pieces that command high prices.” Yang pointed
out that replica makers aged their wares because they knew the pots would be
resold as antiques. “Anyone who denies this and insists that replicas are
replicas and not counterfeits is being dishonest.”
Yang went on to say that some producers used their connections to turn
their replicas into antiques. For example, Xiang sometimes found an associ-
ate who would put one of his replicas up for sale at auction. Xiang would buy
the piece for a high price. Then he resold it as an antique with the help of its
newly fabricated provenance. Since Xiang worked as a porcelain appraiser in
addition to making replicas, his purchase of the pot helped guarantee its
authenticity. “Xiang recently sold one of his wares for 2 million yuan
(US$250,000) at auction in Hong Kong,” Yang said. “People don’t pay that
kind of money for replicas.”
There were also other strategies for getting false authentication, as painter
Zhang informed me. You could persuade a friend who was an appraiser to say
that a pot was genuine, or find an overseas connection who was willing to
claim that a pot had been in her family for generations and then sell the piece
at auction. You could also donate part of your porcelain collection to a
museum. This raised the value of your pots, the remainder of which you
could sell at a higher sum. The museum might also falsely authenticate your
ceramics in exchange for the donation. All these strategies established a
provenance for a replica. “You could do this too,” Zhang said to me encour-
agingly. “You have friends in museums in the U.S. You could earn a lot of
money this way.”

Gillette 389
“Killing the Pig”

Whenever a porcelain worker sold a ware for a large sum of money, more
than she thought the pot was worth, she called this shazhu. This included sell-
ing a replica as an original, but in fact any big sale was called killing the pig.
What could be viewed as legitimate business—getting a high price for some-
thing that you made—was commonly viewed as shazhu. Most producers
were not completely convinced that their wares had a high intrinsic value.
One afternoon while I was visiting Zhou, I noticed that he was painting on
a cracked vase. Zhou reassured me that he knew about the flaw when he
bought the pot. “The seller didn’t kill the pig (meiyou shazhu),” he said. “He
didn’t deceive me (meiyou pian wo).” Guo, who was painting at another desk
in the workroom, piped up that his uncle “intended to deceive someone else
(ta yao pian bie ren).” Zhou wanted to paint the vase in such a way that
customers would not notice the flaw. “He wants to kill the pig,” Guo said.
Yang’s wife Juanjuan had trained as an overglaze enamel painter. When
Yang opened his Yuan replica workshop, he asked his wife to study painting in
underglaze pigments. Juanjuan was not enthusiastic and had a hard time mak-
ing herself practice the patterns that characterized Yuan wares. She did work on
some pots, however, and occasionally Yang fired them. One morning when I
arrived at Yang’s workshop, a buyer was present. I saw that Yang had recently
fired some pots and I picked up one. “Who painted this?” I asked. It didn’t
look like the work of Zhang, Yang’s regular painter and business partner. Yang
answered vaguely, “Somebody.” “Was it Wang?” I persisted. “Was it Zhang?”
“No,” he answered, “It was someone else.” I realized that Yang was being
intentionally evasive and dropped the subject. Later, after the buyer had left,
Yang and Juanjuan explained that they were trying to deceive the buyer and get
him to purchase the ware. “Juanjuan painted it,” Yang said. “We want to kill the
pig. He would never buy the pot if he knew that Juanjuan had painted it,
because she has only been studying underglaze painting for a few months.”
Locals’ sense that a good sale entailed cheating the customer derived from
the indeterminate value of Chinese porcelain. Ceramic workers themselves
believed that some pots were better than others. They attributed value based
on how a pot was produced and its aesthetic qualities. However, this aesthetic
and technical value was not necessarily reflected in market sales. Rather,
producers with official connections and good publicity got rich because they
could “sell their fame,” regardless of whether or not their wares were the most
beautiful or best crafted. In this, Jingdezhen resembled the international mod-
ern and contemporary art market that Plattner (1996) describes. Consumers of
modern and contemporary art rely on the reputation of artists and dealers to

guarantee their art purchases, according to Plattner, because the value of

contemporary art is not based on clearly defined standards.
Jingdezhen porcelain workers were not sure how much an exquisite piece
of porcelain should cost. On the one hand, producers knew that some ceram-
ics sold for vast sums, as did the Yuan dynasty jar auctioned by Christie’s for
US$27.7 million in 2005. On the other, most ceramists did not particularly
like porcelain. Raw materials were cheap and labor cost much less than what
a pot might earn. Pots that exhibited a high degree of technical proficiency
often commanded worse prices than those sold by less-skilled ceramists who
were better connected. This fuelled producer uncertainty about value and the
sense that any profitable sale was “killing the pig.”
I bought several replicas of Yuan dynasty porcelain from Yang before I
left Jingdezhen at the end of 2005. I had broached the subject of buying his
wares many times, and Yang had told me to wait until he produced some pots
that he felt were “useful” or of saleable quality. When the time came that
Yang was regularly producing good quality replicas, I selected three under-
glaze blue stem cups and a small lidded jar and asked how much he wanted
for them. He asked for 1,000 yuan (US$125) and I gave it to him. As I was
wrapping the wares in newspaper and putting them in plastic bags, Yang
came over to me with a larger underglaze blue bottle (a yuhuchunping).
“Here, take this too,” he said. “I made this a long time ago. It’s useless.” In
fact, while the ware was not painted as beautifully as the ones that I had just
bought, Yang could easily have sold it.
Yang’s gift resulted from his discomfort over the sale in the context of our
relationship. Perhaps Yang had expected me to bargain for the replicas, since
this was the normal practice in Jingdezhen. While Yang believed in the qual-
ity of his works and was determined not to sell them too cheaply, he also felt
close to me. I had visited his home, played with his daughter, and met his
parents. I had helped Yang make clay and had moved his greenware out of the
rain. One thousand yuan was a huge sum in local terms. Yang was hesitant
about killing the pig when I was the consumer. He made me a gift of the vase
to preclude any possibility that he had taken advantage of me.
Protection from Deception

Porcelain industry workers thought that personal relations could protect them
from deception. Jingdezhen was rife with counterfeits—not only porcelain
but also money and other consumer goods, such as clothing, food, laundry
detergent, and personal hygiene products. This was a national trend in the
opening decade of the twenty-first century (see, e.g., Notar, 2006; Hanser,

Gillette 391
2008: 141–43, 161–63, 176). Porcelain entrepreneurs tried to minimize the

likelihood of becoming victims of deceit by having close ties to their coworkers,
employees, and when possible, suppliers and customers.
Locals worked as much as they could with relatives. This included kin
from their father’s and mother’s sides. All of the workshops that I visited had
relatives working together. The collaborations I saw included siblings, par-
ents, and married couples; cousins (including some very distant cousins),
nieces, and nephews; and affines such as mother’s sister’s husband. For
example, when I arrived at Yang’s workshop in August 2005, he had three
relatives working for him. Yang’s wife Juanjuan was learning to paint with
underglaze pigments. She also cooked lunch and dinner for Yang and his
crew if they were working long hours. Yang’s matrilateral cousin, Hu, was
also learning to paint with underglaze pigments. Yang called Hu his appren-
tice (tudi). Unlike Juanjuan, Hu had never received any training in painting
before he started working for Yang. Hu practiced sketching and painting
using books, shards, and other people’s replicas as models. He also helped
Yang make clay and transport pots, and took turns sweeping the workshop
with Yang’s other apprentice, Little Yang. Little Yang was Yang’s father’s
younger brother’s son. He was learning to hand press clay into molds. Little
Yang also wedged clay, helped make clay, transported pots, and swept. Hu
and Little Yang were in charge of the workshop if Yang were not present.
If relatives were not available, the next source of workers was one’s native
place. A number of porcelain producers that I knew exclusively employed
people from their home villages. Sometimes these co-villagers were also dis-
tant relatives. For example, Jiang employed three overglaze enamel painters
in her workshop. All were from Duchang, Jiang’s native place. At least one
of these employees was a distant cousin of Jiang’s on her father’s side. Jiang
also took on an apprentice from Duchang.
Failing family or co-villagers, an entrepreneur hired a person with whom
she had worked in someone else’s workshop or in a factory. For example, the
Shao brothers largely relied on family for production. Shao and his brother
made pots in the workshop, while Shao’s wife minded their storefront. Shao’s
father occasionally came to help his sons transport pots and perform other
tasks. In addition, the Shaos employed a woman who had worked for several
years with Shao the younger in a collective porcelain factory.
The group of people who had worked in Yang’s uncle’s workshop used
shared employment as a source for business contacts. Many of Yang’s uncle’s
employees quit at the same time, blaming the uncle’s gambling addiction and
his failure to pay wages. A number continued working as makers of Yuan
replicas. Some, like Yang, had started their own production sites, while others

were employees in factories. These former coworkers called upon each other
for help. For example, when Yang needed an underglaze blue painter, he
asked Wang, who (along with his sister) used to paint for Yang’s uncle. Wang
almost always made time to paint for Yang. On the rare occasions when
Wang was not available, he introduced Yang to another underglaze blue
painter who could help Yang out. When Wang’s sister wanted to hire a per-
manent hand-presser, she asked Yang to join her. Since Yang wanted to run
his own enterprise, he refused, but introduced her to a former apprentice of
his who became her hand-presser.
Despite producers’ claims that they were “completely self-taught” and
“depended solely on themselves,” I saw ceramists calling on their networks for
help transporting large pieces, buying train tickets for travel to an exhibition,
and selling wares. Producers cultivated close relations in which the participants
felt a sense of obligation.
Gong spoke with me about how close interpersonal relations worked in
Jingdezhen. “You will do anything for your close friends,” she told me. “You
can’t refuse a good friend a loan, even when you don’t have the money. If you
have money and your friend doesn’t, you always treat your poor friend to
dinner. You’ll do anything for your friends,” she repeated. “You carry them
along with you as part of your body.”
The moral obligations of interpersonal relations strongly influenced cera-
mists’ copying practices. Porcelain workers readily replicated wares from
books, photographs, pots, and shards. These materials put distance between
the copyist and the original ceramist. Producers copied wares using the pub-
lications of other local producers, as long as the other producers were not
present. This kind of imitation was an accepted business practice in what
locals viewed as a highly competitive market.
While anonymous copying was tolerated, personalized copying was not.
When replication took place directly between two human beings who knew
each other, industry workers denounced the copyist. This was made clear to
me one afternoon in December 2005 when I went to visit Zhou and his
nephew in their combined workshop and storefront.
“It’s been so long since I’ve seen you!” Zhou exclaimed as I walked in his
store. After I sat down in the cramped area in the back where Zhou and his
nephew worked, Zhou told me about some of the recent events in his life.
While we chatted, Zhou painted a fish on a vase while looking at a book for
reference. The book showcased the ceramic works of several contemporary
“famous” Jingdezhen artists (mingren ciqi), including a man who according
to his biography specialized in painting fish. Zhou’s fish scene closely resem-
bled that of the artist in the book.

Gillette 393
A loud commotion from the street interrupted our conversation. Zhou

went out to look and I followed. Across the alley, a woman who sold hand-
painted ceramic tiles and a man who I had never seen before were screaming
at one another. “You deceived me!” the man yelled. “You never intended to
hire me to paint for you! You just brought me in here to paint one piece for
you so that your husband could copy it!” “That’s not true!” the woman
screamed back. “I tried to find you but I couldn’t! I wasn’t able to contact
you!” “You just wanted to steal my technique and my subject matter!” the
man retorted. “You were never going to enter into a long-term relationship
with me, regardless of what you promised!” “It’s not so!” the woman pro-
tested. The shouting went on for about twenty minutes. After a while, the
shopkeepers, porcelain workers, and customers in the area grew tired of
watching the scene and the man left.
I discussed the fight with Zhou and his nephew when we went back inside.
“What happened?” I asked. Zhou explained that the woman had hired the
man to paint porcelain for her, but instead of asking him back to paint more
pieces, her husband had copied the man’s wares. Zhou and his nephew both
agreed that it was not possible that the woman had been unable to find the
painter. Zhou’s nephew remarked, “Everyone has cell phones these days.”
The woman had intentionally hired the man in order to have a piece of work
to replicate. “I’ve never liked that woman,” Zhou commented. “I’ve always
thought that she wasn’t trustworthy.”
Ceramics and Contemporary Capitalism

Most porcelain workers in Jingdezhen engaged in deceptive practices. They
made replicas that they knew would be sold as antiques. They copied wares
made by their neighbors. They claimed to have produced pots that others had
made. They used their social connections to buy off judges and get prizes in
competitions. Some found people who would falsely certify their porcelain
as antique. Others manipulated auction houses and museums for the same
purpose. “Killing the pig”—making a big sale by taking advantage of a
customer—was a key goal. Ceramists were able to engage in these activities
because of how they thought about market actors and how porcelain production
was organized.
Ethnographic studies from other parts of China suggest that copying, coun-
terfeiting, and other fraudulent activities characterize contemporary capitalism
in the People’s Republic (Hanser, 2008; Notar, 2006; see also Feng, 2007). For
example, in an article on tourism and entrepreneurship in Dali, Yunnan, Beth
Notar (2006) describes Bai entrepreneurs selling fake antiques and heirlooms

to tourists and the local circulation of counterfeit money, impersonators, and

other types of phony goods. While state officials tried to get rid of fake medi-
cine, liquor, and counterfeit money, they did not concern themselves with
bogus antiques (89–90). Notar writes that the sham heirloom producers who
scammed consumers themselves worried about buying fakes from others. She
connects fraudulent activity and anxiety about deception to the increased circu-
lation of unfamiliar people and goods in Dali since the market reforms. Notar’s
encounter with Natalie, a souvenir shop owner in Chamonix who employed
Yunnan artists to paint landscapes that Natalie sells as “French” souvenirs to
Japanese tourists, only emphasizes her point that the anonymity of market rela-
tions under capitalism facilitates dishonesty (64–65).
Amy Hanser discusses copying and counterfeiting in Harbin’s clothing
markets (2008: chap. 5). Hanser describes a local bazaar as a “copycat econ-
omy” where merchants replicate competitors’ goods that sell well (140–45).
Sellers and customers agree that Harbin’s private clothing market is full of
fake goods, “false” (xu) people, and dishonest transactions. Consumers
across the city show their distrust of market transactions by sharply interro-
gating salesclerks and scrupulously examining goods (159–64, 168–71). The
private clothing entrepreneurs that Hanser quotes describe the market in
ways that closely resemble the commentary of Jingdezhen ceramists: “If
someone knows how well your sales are going and how much you are earn-
ing, they might be tempted to copy your merchandise,” says Mr. Zhou, a shirt
seller (141). Hanser ties fakes, copying, and consumer anxiety to the imple-
mentation of capitalism (160, 163). As in Dali, the lack of connection between
buyers and clients in Harbin’s bazaar stimulates anxieties about trickery and
the use of deception to make sales (134–35).
Fakes, dishonesty, and fears of cheating characterize the implementation
of capitalism in other formerly socialist economies. Buyandelgeriyn (2007)
depicts Buryats trapped by doubt and fear about deception, falsehood, and
profiteering in the newly marketized Mongolia. Holy (1992), working in the
present-day Czech Republic just after the fall of socialism, writes that Czechs
believe that some greedy and self-interested market actors violate the public
trust. Dunn (2004: 29–31) states that Polish citizens fear profiteering and
deception in their newly marketized economy. When a former state-enter-
prise baby food factory in Rzesów, Poland, was sold on the private market,
workers and others were convinced that “trickery” had occurred. In all these
cases we see a shared belief that individuals operating on the market will
deceive others for personal profit.
In Jingdezhen, ideas about markets as impersonal, market actors as
self-interested, and market transactions as deceitful arose with neoliberal

Gillette 395
capitalism in the late 1990s. Porcelain entrepreneurs viewed people operating

on the market as atomized individuals who were unaccountable to one
another and so prone to deceit in pursuit of profit. Indeed, Jingdezhen resi-
dents spoke as if everyone was cheating and lying to get ahead. Policemen
took bribes. Officials gave contracts to their friends, funded development
projects that were unnecessary, and embezzled from the government.
Newspapers were full of stories of official corruption. These ideas fuelled the
boom in porcelain copying and counterfeiting.
The organization of ceramic production, with its highly specialized divi-
sion of labor, allowed ceramists to disconnect themselves from their decep-
tion. Because many individuals worked on a pot, who precisely was responsible
for a counterfeit or cheat was ambiguous. For example, five individuals
worked on a replica, from making the form to firing it to decorating it to
aging it to selling it. If the replica were sold as an antique, would all the cera-
mists who worked on the product be equally culpable? Producers in
Jingdezhen could avoid taking individual responsibility for copying and
counterfeiting because wares passed through so many hands. They also kept
themselves from confronting their own copying by focusing on objects rather
than creators. A ceramist replicated an image or a pot, and refused to acknowl-
edge that another person’s labor was behind the object she copied. Social
distance allowed ceramists to depersonalize their deception.
Government officials’ decision to tolerate reproductions of all sorts, and
their passivity in the face of copyright infringement, encouraged copying.
Officials were confronted with countless copies of contemporary and histori-
cal art whenever they passed through the streets of Jingdezhen, but chose to
ignore the practice. Without a state or some other organization (such as a
guild) to enforce rights of manufacture, production in Jingdezhen became a
free for all. The government further promoted deception by failing to treat all
ceramists impartially. State officials patronized some artists and ceramic
workshops, bringing delegations of visitors to these producers and sending
contracts for commissions their way. A few entrepreneurs realized significant
monetary benefits from this patronage, and everyone else was left to fend for
themselves. Ceramists recognized that these official practices gave some pro-
ducers unfair advantages (and they tried hard to incorporate officials into their
personal networks). State support of market inequality lent dynamism to pro-
ducers’ sense that any method of making money was permissible.
In the preceding paragraphs I emphasize the new ideas and behaviors
brought about through the transition to capitalism in Jingdezhen’s porcelain
industry since 1998. My analysis echoes the findings of Elizabeth Dunn
(2004) and others whose empirical research in specific locales demonstrates

that capitalism promotes new ideologies and new practices. However, the
transformation wrought by capitalism is only half of the process that I want
to illuminate. While the market economy affected how ceramists thought and
what they did, preexisting beliefs and social formations strongly influenced
contemporary porcelain production.
While scholars differ as to whether China’s traditional handicraft industries
should be called capitalist (e.g., Fang, 2002: 143), petty capitalist (e.g., Gates,
1996), or pre-capitalist (e.g., Cooper, 1980), market-driven production systems
existed in late imperial China. Prior to nationalization in the 1950s, Jingdezhen
had a long history of commodity production and a highly commercialized
industry. Already in the Yuan dynasty Jingdezhen’s commercial porcelain man-
ufacture was huge (Harrison-Hall, 2001: 19–21). Mass production by a highly
organized and specialized work force was in place by the sixteenth century
(Emerson et al., 2000: 271; Fang, 2002: 143–45; Harrison-Hall, 2001: 19–25;
Harrison-Hall, 1997: 195; Kerr and Wood, 2004: 209–14). Market-oriented
porcelain production and an elaborated division of labor characterized late
imperial commodity production in Jingdezhen and in other industries such as
wood carving, paper-making, lacquer production, and silk weaving (Cooper,
1980: 36; Harrison-Hall, 1997: 195; Harrison-Hall, 2001: 21).
As with contemporary porcelain production, much of Jingdezhen’s tradi-
tional industry was family based (Fang, 2002: preface, sec. 2, chaps. 1–2). In
her study of Jingdezhen’s late imperial and early Republican commercial
potteries, Fang describes myriad sectors of the porcelain industry dominated
by family businesses. These include throwers (2002: 160), overglaze painters
(168), pigment makers (173), entrepreneurs who repaired and sold second
hand porcelain (176), firewood sellers (181), makers of knives and tools for
trimming (184), brush producers (184), and kiln builders (172). Family-
centered production typified Chinese industry prior to the 1950s (see Cooper,
1980: 23, 31, chap. 4, chap. 6; Gates, 1996; Tayler, 1930). According to Gates
(1996), family enterprise was a mainstay of Chinese society since at least the
Song dynasty. She attributes this to the Chinese state’s support of family and
lineage corporations rather than contract-based corporations (36–37).
Native place association is another aspect of contemporary capitalism that
has roots in traditional Chinese society. Both Cooper and Fang write that
Chinese drew on place of origin as a resource for production in late imperial
handicraft industries (Cooper 1980: chap. 4; Fang, 2002: sec. 2, chap. 3).
Producers of art-carved furniture used native place connections to locate
labor, restrict entry into the profession, get credit, and socialize (Cooper,
1980: chap. 4). In Jingdezhen, place of origin played a major role in deter-
mining who went into what sector of the porcelain industry (Fang, 2002: 190,

Gillette 397
198, 201, 209). Place of origin often overlapped with kinship (145). For
example, the managers of Jingdezhen’s kilns in the late imperial period and
the early twentieth century were mostly from Duchang and surnamed Feng,
Yu, Jiang, and Cao. After 1674, the Wei lineage, a group of relatives from a
shared place of origin, had a monopoly on building and repairing the imperial
kilns (Kerr and Wood, 2004: 212). Overall, Fang argues that family, relatives,
and people who shared a native place association were the foundation of
labor in Jingdezhen’s handicraft industry (2002: 185–86, 201).
Anthropologists working in late twentieth-century Taiwan, Hong Kong,
and the Chinese diaspora also found that Chinese capitalism centered on fam-
ily, native place, and personal networks (e.g., Cooper, 1980; Gates, 1996;
Oxfeld, 1993; Stites, 1982a, 1982b, 1985). For example, Richard Stites
investigated private industry in Yingge, Taiwan, during the early 1970s. Most
of Yingge’s production was ceramics, and the industry was dominated by
family businesses (1982a, 1982b, 1985). Stites writes that a goal of most
Chinese entrepreneurs was to “decrease dependence on nonrelatives and
increase economic dependence on the family” (1985: 243; see also 1982a:
140, 159). Eugene Cooper researched and apprenticed in the art-carved furniture
industry in Hong Kong during the 1970s. He writes that family, kinship,
and native place were key methods for recruiting workers (1980: chap. 4).
Ellen Oxfeld studied Chinese tanneries in Calcutta (now called Kolkata)
during the 1980s. Of 297 Chinese tanneries, 295 were family businesses
(1993: 96–97). Oxfeld identifies a preference for personalizing business rela-
tions that sounds very similar to 2005 Jingdezhen (129–30).
In pointing out how local social practices and cultural ideologies affect the
operations of capitalism, I follow the work of Sylvia Yanagisako (2002),
Aihwa Ong (1987), and others who argue that actually existing capitalism
must confront sentiments, family structures, gender norms, and beliefs that
were once independent of capitalist production. From Italy to Indonesia,
capitalism must articulate with local forms. In early twenty-first-century
Jingdezhen, porcelain industry workers turned to family and native place
associations for porcelain production because they believed that family and
native place were meaningful sources of solidarity. These connections pro-
moted mutual responsibility and obligation, and so were a useful means of
protection from market deception.
Contemporary economic practices in Jingdezhen differ from commodity
production during the late imperial period or early twentieth century. Notably
absent were the state as an investor in and regulator of porcelain production, and
guilds as units restricting entry into handicraft professions, enforcing producer
monopolies, and ensuring adherence to industry standards (see, e.g., Anagnost,

1985: 26–65; Fang, 2002: sec. 2, chap. 3; Wright, 1920). The indeterminacy
of porcelain’s value related directly to these absences. Ideas about the atom-
ized individual who acted dishonestly in pursuit of profit arrived with the
emergence of a free market in Jingdezhen. Faced with economic competition
and fraud, porcelain producers drew on existing cultural resources to make
markets safe and accountable. Capitalism in contemporary Jingdezhen is
new but not entirely new, old but not entirely old.
Acknowledgments
I presented an earlier version of this research at the Bard Graduate Center and at
Leiden University. I thank Francois Louis, Francesca Del Lago, and Morgan Perkins
for organizing these events, and gratefully express my appreciation for the feedback
of participants. I also thank Felice Fischer, Francois Louis, Eriberto Lozada, Jennifer
Patico, Stevan Harrell, and an anonymous reviewer for their assistance in revising
this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or pub-
lication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/
or authorship of this article:
Funding for this project came from the American Council of Learned Societies, the
National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, and Haverford
College.
Notes
1. The first European production of true or hard paste porcelain was in 1709, when
manufacturers in Meissen, Germany, combined kaolin clay with a calcined alabas-
ter flux (Kerr and Wood, 2004: 710). Although previously Europeans (and many
others) used different media to imitate Jingdezhen’s ceramics, it was not until
German, French, and English potters produced true porcelain that Jingdezhen’s
ceramics industry suffered (Kerr and Wood, 2004: 770–72). Few places outside
China had china stone, the micaceous material that is the foundation of China’s
porcelain industry. Outsiders misunderstood the raw materials from which
Jingdezhen’s porcelain was made, and so copied Jingdezhen’s ceramics by cov-
ering local clays with glazes made from tin (Near East and later Europe), adding
quartz and powdered glass to local clay (Near East and later Europe), adding

Gillette 399
burned animal bone to glass and clay (England), using soapstone (England), and
using barium (England). The best and most comprehensive discussion of this
topic is Kerr and Wood, 2004: 709–98, esp. 740–72.
2. This estimate is based on what I heard from porcelain industry workers and
government officials during my research in Jingdezhen in 2005. Precisely calcu-
lating how many people and what percentage of Jingdezhen’s population worked
in porcelain was difficult. The government did not track employment by industry.
Officials and locals had different ideas about which areas to include as “the city,”
which affected the figures they used. Finally, informants disagreed about who
was part of the industry. While everyone agreed that painters and potters should
be included, they diverged on others (e.g., ceramic brush sellers, porcelain box
makers, etc.).
3. From 1958 until 2002, the central government required that Jingdezhen porce-
lain be fired in coal kilns. Previously the industry had run on wood and bramble
kilns. Entire sectors of the traditional economy, such as the firewood enter-
prises (described in Fang, 2002: 179–81), were wiped out. Private entrepreneurs
brought the first gas kilns to the city in 2002. Shortly thereafter the government
prohibited the use of coal for firing in an effort to reduce air pollution. The last
coal kilns were closing when I visited Jingdezhen in September 2004. None
remained in 2005.
4. I met a few ceramic painters who were able to paint in both underglaze pigments
and overglaze enamels. They had been trained in state research bureaus during
the early 1980s.
5. Most ceramics in Jingdezhen were fired once. If a pot was decorated with over-
glaze pigments, it received a second firing at lower temperatures in a muffle kiln.
6. A recent article published in China Daily described a new set of 7501 ceramics
produced to commemorate the 2008 Olympics. While the article does not state
specifically where the ceramics were made, it suggests they were produced by
the original makers of 7501 ceramics, which means the Light Industry Ceramic
Research Bureau in Jingdezhen. See “Mao Style Vases Unveiled,” China Daily,
16 Oct. 2007: 18.
7. Antiquarianism was a major trend during the Ming. The explosion of printing in
the southern Song allowed connoisseurs to publish books on antiquities and facil-
itated the fashion of collecting antique (gu) ceramics (Kerr and Wood, 2004: 29).
Ming elites assiduously collected Song monochromes and early Ming underglaze
blue and underglaze red porcelain (Kerr and Wood, 2004: 29–30; Clunas, 1991:
48; Hobson, 1915, vol. 1: xvii–xviii). The most valued pots of earlier periods,
such as Song dynasty white ware from the Ding kilns, were extremely expensive
(Clunas, 1991: 50).

8. Information from testimony I collected in Jingdezhen between 2003 and 2006 and
Chinese sources (Fang, 2000; Luo, 2005) contradicts the sources that claim that no
antique reproductions were made during the Maoist period (e.g., Wain, 2005).
9. Locals gave many reasons why the state and collective enterprises went out of
business. A key factor was that the government ordered banks to stop issuing
loans to porcelain factories. Former workers pointed to poor salesmanship, the
corruption of factory administration, and the heavy burden of providing salaries,
pensions, medical benefits, and housing to workers as other causes. No one ever
suggested poor quality goods as a cause. Locals insisted that Jingdezhen’s porcelain
factories were producing top quality pots when they closed.
10. The site of the imperial manufactory was well known, although the government
did not begin excavating until the late 1990s. A team of Beijing and Jingdezhen
archaeologists conducted a full-scale excavation between 2002 and 2004. The
imperial kiln officially opened to the public in October 2007 (http://www.china.
org.cn/culture/2007-10/19/content_1228886.htm).
11. Late twentieth century and early twenty-first century ceramic analysts have used
scientific methods to determine firing temperatures for a range of historic porce-
lains. This work is published and some Jingdezhen replica makers have read it.
Several conferences devoted to ceramic analysis have been held in Shanghai.
12. Herzfeld, 2004, describes similar practices in Greece.
13. Amy Hanser, 2008: chap. 5, describes similar exchanges between clothing sellers and
consumers in a clothing market in Harbin. Unlike the blasé attitudes expressed
by Jingdezhen entrepreneurs, her informants often found customers’ negative
comments insulting.
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Biography
Maris Gillette is an associate professor of anthropology at Haverford College. She
recently completed a documentary film titled Broken Pots Broken Dreams, about
Jingdezhen porcelain industry workers’ experiences of China’s transition to a market
economy. Her past research has included studies of the consumption patterns and
historical memory of Chinese Muslims (Hui) in Xi’an.

Modern China: Jingdezhen's Porcelain Industry Copying, Counterfeiting, and Capitalism in Contemporary China

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Modern China: Jingdezhen's Porcelain Industry Copying, Counterfeiting, and Capitalism in Contemporary China

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Modern China

Copying, Counterfeiting, and Capitalism in Contemporary China:

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>> Version of Record - Jun 10, 2010

OnlineFirst Version of Record - May 5, 2010

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In July 2005, Christie’s of London sold a fourteenth-century Yuan dynasty jar

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and market activity as dishonest and potentially extremely lucrative. They

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Production and Distribution

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A History of Copying in Jingdezhen

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Wain, 2005: 89). Expert appraisers collaborated with porcelain workers to

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Xuezheng claimed to have founded private production of antique replicas in

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She sold photographs of historic ceramics, photographs of wares in other

Figuring the Dimensions of an Antique Replica

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high-end wares—felt that their sales depended on their ability to reproduce

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Firing, Aging, and Defects

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Copying and Competition

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government no longer invested, and private entrepreneurs focused on short-term

“Everything I Know I Taught Myself ”

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A Way to Earn a Living

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This is true for most of us here. We depend on porcelain to live. We

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Jiang’s subletter explained that he used books with photographs of historic

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“Killing the Pig”

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guarantee their art purchases, according to Plattner, because the value of

Protection from Deception

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2008: 141–43, 161–63, 176). Porcelain entrepreneurs tried to minimize the

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A loud commotion from the street interrupted our conversation. Zhou

Ceramics and Contemporary Capitalism

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to tourists and the local circulation of counterfeit money, impersonators, and

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capitalism in the late 1990s. Porcelain entrepreneurs viewed people operating

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Declaration of Conflicting Interests