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- and male progeny as well as court ladies, officials and consorts. Other local deities depicted in ivory include Guan Di, the God of War; Wen Chang, the patron of the literati; the Stellar God, Gui Xing and the Eight Immortals.
It is interesting to note that these ivory carvings of Fujian also had an important influence on the local ceramic industry. The porcelain modellers at nearby Dehua began to imitate the ivory carvings into white glazed porcelain statues in huge numbers. This porcelain production came to be referred to in the West as blanc de chine. Inexpensive white glazed ceramic figures may have been made to resemble the natural colour and shape of the elephant ivory carvings. Over the centuries, countless numbers of these white porcelain figures found their way to Europe. It is only in the last two decades through study of ivory figures that Westerners became aware their ivory Christian statues were largely responsible for bringing the porcelain figures of Dehua into existence. In the same vein, the Zhangzhou carvers were also noted for carving rhinoceros horns, because of their shape, into libation cups. The Dehua porcelain workers also copied the rhino horn shapes for their white glazed porcelain libation cups.
During the transition from the Ming dynasty into the Qing dynasty in the mid seventeenth century, the Fujian area was badly disrupted by anti-Qing rebellions led by the pirate, Koxinga, and the ivory industry in Fujian largely disappeared. The Dehua porcelain makers did survive and impressive ivory glazed ceramic figurines were made well into the Qing period. By 1684 Guangzhou became the sole official trading port for foreign trade until the early nineteenth century. With the growth in export trade at Guangzhou, including raw ivoiy, the ivory carving business in Fujian shifted to Guangzhou. There all sorts of ivoiy novelties and trinkets were carved in huge numbers for new European trade with the Dutch, English and other East India companies, who also began to include ivory in their cargoes to China. However, it was never a major trading commodity for them.
In 1644 the Manchu conquerors set up their dynasty in China known as the Qing (meaning Pure) with Beijing as the capital. By the 18th centuiy, China enjoyed a period of remarkable peace and prosperity. The second Manchu emperor, Kangxi (r. 1662-1722) set up as many as thirty-one separate arts and crafts workshops or ateliers on the palace grounds. According to ancient lists, one of these workshops was an ivory workshop. In the eighteenth century, imperial ivories were made under the offices of the Ivory Workshop in the Imperial household at the Yangxin Hall and the Ruyi Academy, where skilled carvers from different parts of China produced works of art. It was actually during the reign of the Emperor Yongzheng (1723-35) that skilled ivory workers from the south part of Guangzhou were first summoned or recruited to the court to exercise their consummate, delicate skill, especially in the field of ivory fans and revolving balls. Their work was famed for its delicacy, complexity and ingenuity. After the Guangzhou ivory carvers had entered the imperial workshop they had to strictly follow the designs provided by the Imperial Household Department as well as the demands of the emperor. Guangzhou not only sent skilled ivory craftsmen to Beijing to work at the court, but also through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries presented ivory carvings as tribute to the court.
Guangzhou ivory craftsmen were noted for their techniques and their own regional styles of carving, inlaying and weaving. They were famed for their miniature architectural buildings like pagodas and pavilions and whole compositional scenes as well as for piercing, openwork, staining and the plaiting of their strips of ivory. They could cut ivory
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