European collectors long treated the marks painted beneath imperial Chinese porcelain as the ceramic equivalent of signatures. A six-character reign mark seemed to identify an object as the product of a particular emperor's era, while rarer workshop symbols appeared to promise something still more attractive: an individual maker whose career could be reconstructed. Catalogues consequently organized bowls and vases around named masters whenever a mark could plausibly be attached to one.

Kiln records complicate this picture. At the great manufacturing center of Jingdezhen, porcelain passed through many hands. One worker refined clay, another threw a vessel, others trimmed, glazed, painted, fired, inspected, and packed it. Reign marks were often copied after the reign they named, sometimes as homage and sometimes because buyers associated an earlier period with excellence. Workshop marks served shifting purposes: they might identify a kiln, an order, a batch, or the official responsible for meeting a quota. They rarely functioned as declarations that one person had conceived and executed the whole object. The connoisseur who reads every mark as a signature imports the organization of the modern studio into a production system built around divided labor.

Recognizing this mismatch has led some historians to replace named attribution with a vocabulary of anonymity. That correction is useful but incomplete. The fact that no single artisan authored a vessel does not mean individual judgment disappeared. A painter adjusted a stock peony to the curve of a particular jar; an experienced kiln worker placed fragile pieces where heat would reach them evenly; inspectors enforced standards yet sometimes tolerated departures that later became fashionable. Skill operated throughout the chain, though no one participant controlled it.

The better unit of analysis, then, is neither the heroic maker nor the faceless factory but the coordinated sequence of production. Porcelain acquired its form through relays of constrained decisions. Designs moved through paper patterns, apprenticeship, market samples, and official orders; each transmission preserved some features and altered others. On this view a mark remains valuable evidence, but not as a personal autograph. Joined to shipping lists, kiln logs, and technical traces, it can locate an object within a network of obligations and practices.

This shift changes aesthetic inquiry rather than diminishing its rigor, reach, or complexity. Asking who made a vase tends to direct attention toward originality and personal expression. Asking how a sequence made it brings repetition, correction, and collaboration into view. Those qualities were not obstacles that prevented imperial porcelain from becoming art; they were the conditions under which its extraordinary consistency and controlled variation became possible. The most revealing attribution may therefore be not a name placed beneath an object, but a reconstruction of the many forms of agency distributed across its making.