Types And Veins Of Chinaware And Social Life Of Late Ming Dynasty

As you know, wares are always closely linked with the realities of the age. The chinaware of Jingde town, being the most important ceramic in the Ming dynasty, it had a close connection with the fate of Ming dynasty. In the early of Ming dynasty, the potters, having been incorporated into the national craftsman register, produced the wares mainly for imperial use. And so the chinaware of Jingde town was brought into the ruling order of the state effectively. In order to give prominence to the imperial privilege and put strict official ware system, the earlier official kilns employed the most skilled craftsmen and monopolized the best materials of the chinaware production in Jingde town to make imperial wares, while the civil kilns had no right to imitate. In the middle of Ming, the imperial life became more luxurious and demanded more wares, which multiplied the burden of chinaware production in Jingde town; Meanwhile, the civil kilns often broke prohibition, and the authority of the imperial family was challenged. In the late Ming, the system of official ware declined, civil kilns replaced the official ones, wares for imperial use were produced by civil kilns in the name of official ones, the former gradually broke through the system of the later, and thus there seemed to have no differences between the wares produced by them. At the end of Ming, official kilns declined and fell gradually, civil ones dominated exclusively.Concentrating on the chinaware of Jingde town, the dissertation discusses the social life of late Ming dynasty in three aspects. First, the phenomenon of wares becoming porcelain and the value of the users' in late Ming. And the wares becoming porcelain demanded serial production of wares and specialization of the types; many types of ceramics were developed then, chinaware replaced the objects originally made by other materials. Appealing to chinaware reflected the users' pursuit of perfect experience psychologically, which revealed that the life of upper classes of society, especially that of the imperial family transformed deeply from thrift to luxury, and showed the striking contradictions between the demand of the imperial family and chinaware production of Jingde town. Second, the popularization of chinaware veins and the variation of the current tendencies in society of late Ming. The dissertation elaborates mainly the extremely extravagant and luxurious life in society steadily deteriorated beyond the chinaware. The veins in the chinaware for imperial use in late Ming drew close to folk custom by expressing good fortune as one wishes, even general popularization and excessive ornamentation; the veins on the civil ware broke prohibitions as a result of the theme of pursuing wealth and rank. The scholar class advocated playfulness and drowned themselves in sex and pleasure, they were immersed in worldly luxurious life and tended to vulgarity increasingly; the new upstarts of the city upheld literati habits and characteristics, but they failed to grasp the main points, and got more vulgar. The merchants and potters quoted the classics and showed off their erudition to meet the market demand by fathoming the conventions of the literati and philistine, which were presented somewhat in the veins of chinaware of Jingde town in late Ming. Third, the dissertation makes a further inquiry into the relations between the chinaware of Jingde town and the society of Ming by means of the inscriptions and signatures on them, which reflected the practical ideas of lower strata as well as the living conditions of the lower people under the commercialism environment.Chinaware, as the object of traditional art studies, has been discussed usually in terms of the aesthetics of the ware patterns; while it has been discussed through the historical materials and documents in the study of literature and history to set forth the historical phenomena. Based on the tangible evidences as the types, veins, inscriptions and signatures of the chinaware, the dissertation attempts to interpret the historical cultural phenomena and reconstruct the living conditions in late Ming in the way of historical cultural, social and iconographic methods.The thesis uses the way of cross disciplines, puts forwards mainly the porcelain and popularization of chinaware, and expounds the social changes in Ming dynasty as well as the social life in late Ming.