“Such fragile jewels”: The Emotional Role of Chinese Porcelain in Early Modern Jesuit Missions

Abstract

This chapter explores how, in the writings of the Jesuit father Francois-Xavier d’Entrecolles (1664–1741), porcelain was constructed as having a vital, emotional role in the missionary endeavor of the Jesuits in China and Europe. D’Entrecolles proselytized in China from 1698 until his death in 1741. In 1712 and 1722, he sent two detailed letters to fellow members of the Society that he claimed would reveal the secret of porcelain manufacture to a highly interested European readership.¹ These letters combined key information shared by Chinese Christian converts in the industry with knowledge he had garnered from ancient texts and his own eyewitness observations in the manufacturies of Jingdezhen. His detailed reports, which were reproduced across Europe, coupled with the contemporaneous discoveries of Johann Friedrich Bottger (1682–1719) in Saxony, were to break the Asian monopoly on hard-paste porcelain production in the eighteenth century. Up until then, the trade in porcelain had been dominated by the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company; hereafter voc); its display was a crucial representational tool of first Protestant, then more broadly aristocratic, elites in Europe.²