Canton & Falangcai enamels / hard and soft color pigments

[peterp]

Any information on the nature of the Canton enamels or related information sources would be of interest.
Here in the Far East it is difficult to get much information on the subject, probably because there are few records here to begin with, and these are mostly abroad because they were only used for export porcelain and in the palace. And, the Chinese show really little interest in researching this type of porcelain.

All I know currently is that the enamels probably consisted of a pigment that was heated (or fired) before being used for painting decoration. This appears to be similar as the 'falangcai' colors rxclusively used on items painted in the palace from the Kangxi to the Qianlong reigns. It possibly also applies to the slightly purplish tinted blue pigment known from the late Qing dynasty. They were all originally imported.
To my information they were heat-treated, which meant they would not change color in the kiln and came out the same as they went in before firing. The other enamel colors of Chinese origin mostly looked different afterwards.

Falangcai, Canton enamels and the late Qing blue pigments were initially all called "Yangcai", meaning foreign colors. Falangcai and Canton enamels are also called "hard" colors by the Chinese, because they could not be toned down to lighter hues. E.g., red would have been uniformly red and could not be thinned to appear as a lighter, more pinkish tone, etc. That was possible with fencai colors, though, which are called "soft" colors in Chinese.

But not all Chinese pigments were "soft"-- the early green-red and wucai, for example, used in the Ming dynasty, for example, were also "hard" colors (think of Zhangzhou wares).