The Crafting and Connoisseurship of Inkstones in Eighteenth-Century China

Body, Text, and Stone: The Crafting and Connoisseurship of Inkstones in Eighteenth-Century China Dorothy Ko Barnard College, Columbia University I’m writing a book that traces the movement of one class of object (the inkstone) and two groups of people (artisans 1 and scholars) through four locales (Zhaoqing肇慶, on the southern edge of the empire; Fuzhou, on the southeastern seaboard; Suzhou, at the cultural and economic core; Beijing, the political center) in the eighteenth century. Specifically, I map three trajectories: the flow of knowledge between court and local society; the exchange of skills between scholars and artisans; the circulation of inkstones as functional object, gift and commodity. Thereby I seek to understand the forces behind the formation of a market in inkstones and other objects of art beyond the traditional collectibles of paintings and calligraphy since the late Ming, a development symptomatic of the increasingly commercial environment in which Confucian scholars and artisans alike operated.