The White Road: Journey into an Obsession
An intimate
narrative history of porcelain, structured around five journeys
through landscapes where porcelain was dreamed about, fired, refined,
collected, and coveted.
Extraordinary new
nonfiction, a gripping blend of history and memoir, by the author of
the award-winning and bestselling international sensation, The Hare
with the Amber Eyes.
In The White Road,
bestselling author and artist Edmund de Waal gives us an intimate
narrative history of his lifelong obsession with porcelain, or "white
gold." A potter who has been working with porcelain for more
than forty years, de Waal describes how he set out on five journeys
to places where porcelain was dreamed about, refined, collected and
coveted-and that would help him understand the clay's mysterious
allure. From his studio in London, he starts by travelling to three
"white hills"-sites in China, Germany and England that are
key to porcelain's creation. But his search eventually takes him
around the globe and reveals more than a history of cups and
figurines; rather, he is forced to confront some of the darkest
moments of twentieth-century history.
Part memoir, part
history, part detective story, The White Road chronicles a global
obsession with alchemy, art, wealth, craft, and purity. In a sweeping
yet intimate style that recalls The Hare with the Amber Eyes, de Waal
gives us a singular understanding of "the spectrum of porcelain"
and the mapping of desire.
The White Road by Edmund de Waal review – incidents, marvels and misery
The
renowned ceramicist’s elegant, even spiritual account of his
pilgrimage to the three most important sites in the history of
porcelain – Jingzedhen in China, Nazi Dresden and Cornwall
Kathleen Jamie
Thursday 1 October
2015 16.00 BST
Edmund de Waal is a
potter, a successful ceramicist who has worked with porcelain for 25
years. The idea behind The White Road is given on page three. “It’s
really quite simple, a pilgrimage of sorts, to beginnings, a chance
to walk up the mountain where the white earth comes from …I have a
plan to go to three places where porcelain was invented, or
reinvented, three white hills in China and Germany and England.”
Three white hills, each yielding a white object.
It does sound
simple, elegant; even, dare one say, spiritual. A white road. But
although De Waal sticks to the plan, it’s hard to know what the
book is: is it a quest, a biography, a history, a travelogue or a bit
of all? Certainly a bit of all.
Its three major
sections – China, Dresden, Cornwall – each has its hill, and each
its white object. For centuries, only the Chinese knew how to make
porcelain. They had discovered that it requires two minerals to be
mixed: petuntse, which means little white brick, and kaolin. Both are
white. Both have to be mined, purified and mixed in the correct
proportions. Intense heat is also necessary. Temperatures of 1,300C
fuse the two; porcelain is almost a form of glass.
Kaolin is named
after a mountain, Kao-ling, near Jingdezhen, in Jiangxi province,
which has been a centre of porcelain production for 1,000 years. So
the book opens with a travelogue, an account of being in the midst of
a contemporary Jingdezhen, of trying to make sense of it and not get
lost or run over, while seeking evidence of early porcelain-making.
The author stops outside a farm, a modern house, half built, half
stucco over thin Chinese brick, old barns set among trees, and under
the wheels of his car are shards, pale crescents of porcelain in the
red earth.
When De Waal picks
up of a piece of 12th-century porcelain from a spoil heap in “a
whole landscape of porcelain”, evidence of firings that have gone
wrong, he describes it as a “grail moment”. There are hundreds of
such old kiln sites, on hillsides where a couple of dozen potters
might have been employed. The finished pots would have been taken
down to the river, and floated to the city, delivered to the great
and wealthy – to a succession of emperors, such as Zhu Di, a
monster, mass murderer and builder of the Forbidden City, who ordered
the construction of a nine-storey pagoda, glazed with white porcelain
bricks from Jingdezhen. A wonder of the world, it survived 500 years,
by which time endless thousands of pieces of porcelain ware had been
made. Archives kept in the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute show the
last order placed by an emperor to Jingdezhen is dated 1912. Soon
after that, the imperial porcelain stores were being looted. But Mao
also enjoyed gifts and tributes; he received two specially fired
138-piece tea sets.
By the 17th century,
interest in porcelain was peaking in Europe. News from China reached
the court at Versailles, mostly from Jesuits. In due course,
porcelain arrived; a Versailles inventory dated 1689 lists 381
pieces. Of course, Louis XIV wanted his own manufactories, but no one
in Europe knew how. Factories in France failed, attention shifted to
Germany, and an extraordinary saga ensued, whereby a mathematician
called Tschirnhaus, who had contacts with Spinoza and Leibnitz,
teamed up with a damaged boy alchemist called Böttger. The tale here
comes very close to fairy story. There are tests, kilns, firing,
failures. The boy is imprisoned, and then freed on condition he keep
good his promise to transmute clay. Tschirnhaus invents large lenses
capable of concentrating enough heat to melt Chinese porcelain.
Between them, after years of error, they manage to produce one white
translucent cup, whereupon Tschirnhaus dies.
The quest comes next
to England, and one feels glad. Surely, the calm and sensible Quakers
in Cornwall will be less frenetic in their bid to make porcelain, and
the tale will be more measured in the telling? But the story leaps at
once to Wedgwood, and to North America, to the Cherokee nation, in
whose lands the necessary ingredients are said to lie. A
messenger/merchant is sent to undergo adventures and privations, and
to secure five tons of white clay, to be shipped home. But he needn’t
have gone so far; the two minerals are present in Cornwall. A cider
tankard with a vernacular handle, a pleasingly humble object, is made
in Plymouth and becomes the first piece of true porcelain ever made
in England. The third “white hill” is close to home.
At 400 pages, this
book is long, and what fills it is a scurry of names, incidents,
marvels and misery. For a quest, especially a spiritual one, it is
profoundly materialistic; concerned with the stuff of the world,
literally clay. Because this clay is extracted and transmuted and
shaped into luxury items, De Waal is concerned also with ownership;
and the undertow is one of misery and forced labour on the part of
those who will never own anything much. He explores the demands of
emperors and kings, centuries even before we reach the porcelain
works at Dachau. Himmler craved the stuff. At Christmas, Nazis gave
each other porcelain figurines.
George Orwell
famously said that a writer should be as a pane of glass; how I
longed for De Waal’s prose to take on the virtues of the porcelain
he admires: to be translucent, luminous, white. As it is, The White
Road is delivered in a breezy, newsy present tense. With short blocks
of text. And many sentences that begin with “and”. And many that
begin with “I need”, as in, “I need to get to Dresden.” There
are sections in third person, sections in second person. It whirls.
But that is De
Waal’s undoubted talent: his charm lies in his ability to undertake
obsessive research, to pile up and accrue, to involve the reader in
this almost frantic travelling and note-taking and reading. It’s
leavened with some self-deprecating humour. He knows he’s doing it.
He says, if you make things out of porcelain clay, you live in the
present moment. Perhaps that accounts for the breathlessness.
Also slipped in are
slender notes toward an autobiography; about his early days as a
potter, making X in Wales, then Y in Sheffield, before finding
success and its trappings: studio assistants, installations and
exhibitions in London and New York, commissions for wealthy
collectors. It is this, the ventures into the elite world of
ownership, that brings us closest to his previous book, The Hare with
Amber Eyes. It would have been interesting to read De Waal on the way
the unfortunate, often humble craftsman is implicated in this craze
for ownership and luxury goods; the labourers, miners and
piece-workers. He admits to being caught up in a cult of ownership.
He even refers, in a kingly way, to “my Jesuit”, “my
alchemist”, “my mathematician”.
There are two kinds
of people in the world. One lot are hoarders, those frightened to let
anything go, who imbue objects with memories, who feel aghast, naked,
stripped of their identity without their accumulations, collections,
crowded cabinets and vitrines. They will love this book. The other
kind, those who value silence and space, may feel they are
asphyxiating, that time and a thorough edit would have revealed the
book’s true shape, its “beautiful resonance”. There’s no
doubting that The White Road is a mighty achievement, but De Waal is
himself relieved when it’s over, and he is back at his wheel in his
studio, throwing white pots, “making again”.
The HISTORY of PORCELAIN
Porcelain is a
ceramic material made by heating materials, generally including
kaolin, in a kiln to temperatures between 1,200 and 1,400 °C (2,200
and 2,600 °F). The toughness, strength, and translucence of
porcelain, relative to other types of pottery, arises mainly from
vitrification and the formation of the mineral mullite within the
body at these high temperatures.
Porcelain was first
developed in China around 2,000 years ago, then slowly spread to
other East Asian countries, and finally Europe and the rest of the
world. Its manufacturing process is more demanding than that for
earthenware and stoneware, the two other main types of pottery, and
it has usually been regarded as the most prestigious type of pottery
for its delicacy, strength, and its white colour. It combines well
with both glazes and paint, and can be modelled very well, allowing a
huge range of decorative treatments in tablewares, vessels and
figurines. It also has many uses in technology and industry.
The European name,
porcelain in English, come from the old Italian porcellana (cowrie
shell) because of its resemblance to the translucent surface of the
shell. Porcelain is also referred to as china or fine china in some
English-speaking countries, as it was first seen in imports from
China. Properties associated with porcelain include low permeability
and elasticity; considerable strength, hardness, toughness,
whiteness, translucency and resonance; and a high resistance to
chemical attack and thermal shock.
Porcelain has been
described as being "completely vitrified, hard, impermeable
(even before glazing), white or artificially coloured, translucent
(except when of considerable thickness), and resonant." However,
the term porcelain lacks a universal definition and has "been
applied in a very unsystematic fashion to substances of diverse kinds
which have only certain surface-qualities in common".Traditional East Asian thinking only classifies pottery into
low-fired wares (earthenware) and high-fired wares (porcelain),
without the intermediate European class of stoneware, and the many
local types of stoneware were mostly classed as porcelain, though
often not white and translucent. Terms such as "porcellaneous"
or "near-porcelain" may be used in such cases. A high
proportion of modern porcelain is made of the variant bone china.
Kaolin is the
primary material from which porcelain is made, even though clay
minerals might account for only a small proportion of the whole. The
word "paste" is an old term for both the unfired and fired
material. A more common terminology these days for the unfired
material is "body"; for example, when buying materials a
potter might order an amount of porcelain body from a vendor.
The composition of
porcelain is highly variable, but the clay mineral kaolinite is often
a raw material. Other raw materials can include feldspar, ball clay,
glass, bone ash, steatite, quartz, petuntse and alabaster.
The clays used are
often described as being long or short, depending on their
plasticity. Long clays are cohesive (sticky) and have high
plasticity; short clays are less cohesive and have lower plasticity.
In soil mechanics, plasticity is determined by measuring the increase
in content of water required to change a clay from a solid state
bordering on the plastic, to a plastic state bordering on the liquid,
though the term is also used less formally to describe the facility
with which a clay may be worked. Clays used for porcelain are
generally of lower plasticity and are shorter than many other pottery
clays. They wet very quickly, meaning that small changes in the
content of water can produce large changes in workability. Thus, the
range of water content within which these clays can be worked is very
narrow and consequently must be carefully controlled.
Forming
Unlike their
lower-fired counterparts, porcelain wares do not need glazing to
render them impermeable to liquids and for the most part are glazed
for decorative purposes and to make them resistant to dirt and
staining. Many types of glaze, such as the iron-containing glaze used
on the celadon wares of Longquan, were designed specifically for
their striking effects on porcelain. Bisque porcelain is unglazed.
Decoration
Porcelain wares may
be decorated under the glaze using pigments that include cobalt and
copper or over the glaze using coloured enamels. Like many earlier
wares, modern porcelains are often biscuit-fired at around 1,000 °C
(1,830 °F), coated with glaze and then sent for a second
glaze-firing at a temperature of about 1,300 °C (2,370 °F) or
greater. Another early method is once-fired where the glaze is
applied to the unfired body and the two fired together in a single
operation.
Firing
In this process,
green (unfired) ceramic wares are heated to high temperatures in a
kiln to permanently set their shapes. Porcelain is fired at a higher
temperature than earthenware so that the body can vitrify and become
non-porous.
Chinese porcelain
Porcelain originated
in China. Although proto-porcelain wares exist dating from the Shang
Dynasty (1600–1046 BC), by the time of the Eastern Han Dynasty
period (206 BC – 220 AD), glazed ceramic wares had developed into
porcelain. Porcelain manufactured during the Tang Dynasty (618–907
AD) was exported to the Islamic world, where it was highly prized.
Early porcelain of this type includes the tri-colour glazed
porcelain, or sancai wares. There is no precise date to separate the
production of proto-porcelain from that of porcelain. Porcelain items
in the sense that we know them today could be found in the Tang
Dynasty, and archaeological finds have pushed the dates back to as
early as the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD). By the Sui Dynasty
(581–618 AD) and Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD), porcelain was widely
produced.
Eventually,
porcelain and the expertise required to create it began to spread
into other areas of East Asia. During the Song Dynasty (960–1279
AD), artistry and production had reached new heights. The manufacture
of porcelain became highly organised, and the kiln sites excavated
from this period could fire as many as 25,000 wares. While Xing Ware
is regarded as among the greatest of the Tang Dynasty porcelain, Ding
Ware became the premier porcelain of Song Dynasty.
By the time of the
Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 AD), porcelain wares were being exported to
Europe. Some of the most well-known Chinese porcelain art styles
arrived in Europe during this era, such as the coveted blue-and-white
wares. The Ming Dynasty controlled much of the porcelain trade, which
was expanded to Asia, Africa and Europe via the Silk Road. In 1517,
Portuguese merchants began direct trade by sea with the Ming Dynasty,
and in 1598, Dutch merchants followed.
Some porcelains were
more highly valued than others in imperial China. We can identify the
most valued types by their association with the court, either as
tribute offerings, or as products of kilns under imperial
supervision. Some of the best-known examples are of Jingdezhen
porcelain. During the Ming dynasty, Jingdezhen porcelain become a
source of imperial pride. The Yongle emperor erected a white
porcelain brick-faced pagoda at Nanjing, and an exceptionally
smoothly glazed type of white porcelain is peculiar to his reign.
Jingdezhen porcelain's fame came to a peak in the Qing dynasty.
Japanese porcelain
Nabeshima ware dish
with Hydrangeas, c. 1680-1720, Arita, Okawachi kilns, hard-paste
porcelain with cobalt and enamels
Although the
Japanese elite were keen importers of Chinese porcelain from early
on, they were not able to make their own until the arrival of Korean
potters taken captive during the Japanese invasions of Korea
(1592–98). They brought an improved type of kiln, and one of them
spotted a source of porcelain clay near Arita, and before long
several kilns had started in the region. At first their wares were
similar to the cheaper and cruder Chinese porcelains with underglaze
blue decoration that were already widely sold in Japan; this style
was to continue for cheaper everyday wares until the 20th century.
Exports to Europe
began around 1660, through the Dutch East India Company, the only
Europeans allowed a trading presence. Chinese exports had been
seriously disrupted by civil wars as the Ming dynasty fell apart, and
the Japanese exports increased rapidly to fill the gap. At first the
wares used European shapes and mostly Chinese decoration, as the
Chinese had done, but gradually original Japanese styles developed.
Nabeshima ware was produced in kilns owned by that family of feudal
lords, and used decoration in the Japanese tradition, much of it
related to textile design. This was not initially exported, but used
for gifts to other aristocratic families. Imari ware and Kakiemon are
broad terms for styles of export porcelain with overglaze "enamelled"
decoration begun in the early period, both with many sub-types.
A great range of
styles and manufacturing centres were in use by the start of the 19th
century, and as Japan opened to trade in the second half, exports
expanded hugely, and quality typically declined. Much traditional
porcelain continues to repeat older methods of production and styles,
and there are several modern industrial manufacturers.
European porcelain
These exported
Chinese porcelains were held in such great esteem in Europe that in
the English language china became a commonly–used synonym for the
Franco-Italian term porcelain. The first mention of porcelain in
Europe is in Il Milione by Marco Polo in XII sec. Apart from copying
Chinese porcelain in faience (tin glazed earthenware), the soft-paste
Medici porcelain in 16th-century Florence was the first real European
attempt to reproduce it, with little success.
Early in the 16th
century, Portuguese traders returned home with samples of kaolin,
which they discovered in China to be essential in the production of
porcelain wares. However, the Chinese techniques and composition used
to manufacture porcelain were not yet fully understood. Countless
experiments to produce porcelain had unpredictable results and met
with failure. In the German state of Saxony, the search concluded in
1708 when Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus produced a hard, white,
translucent type of porcelain specimen with a combination of
ingredients, including kaolin and alabaster, mined from a Saxon mine
in Colditz. It was a closely guarded trade secret of the
Saxon enterprise.
In 1712, many of the
elaborate Chinese porcelain manufacturing secrets were revealed
throughout Europe by the French Jesuit father Francois Xavier
d'Entrecolles and soon published in the Lettres édifiantes et
curieuses de Chine par des missionnaires jésuites. The secrets,
which d'Entrecolles read about and witnessed in China, were now known
and began seeing use in Europe.
Meissen
Von Tschirnhaus and
Johann Friedrich Böttger were employed by Augustus II the Strong and
worked at Dresden and Meissen in the German state of Saxony.
Tschirnhaus had a wide knowledge of science and had been involved in
the European quest to perfect porcelain manufacture when in 1705
Böttger was appointed to assist him in this task. Böttger had
originally been trained as a pharmacist; after he turned to
alchemical research, he claimed to have known the secret of
transmuting dross into gold, which attracted the attention of
Augustus. Imprisoned by Augustus as an incentive to hasten his
research, Böttger was obliged to work with other alchemists in the
futile search for transmutation and was eventually assigned to assist
Tschirnhaus. One of the first results of the collaboration between
the two was the development of a red stoneware that resembled that of
Yixing.
A workshop note
records that the first specimen of hard, white and vitrified European
porcelain was produced in 1708. At the time, the research was still
being supervised by Tschirnhaus; however, he died in October of that
year. It was left to Böttger to report to Augustus in March 1709
that he could make porcelain. For this reason, credit for the
European discovery of porcelain is traditionally ascribed to him
rather than Tschirnhaus.
The Meissen factory
was established in 1710 after the development of a kiln and a glaze
suitable for use with Böttger's porcelain, which required firing at
temperatures of up to 1,400 °C (2,552 °F) to achieve translucence.
Meissen porcelain was once-fired, or green-fired. It was noted for
its great resistance to thermal shock; a visitor to the factory in
Böttger's time reported having seen a white-hot teapot being removed
from the kiln and dropped into cold water without damage. Evidence to
support this widely disbelieved story was given in the 1980s when the
procedure was repeated in an experiment at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Chantilly porcelain,
soft-paste, 1750-1760
The pastes produced
by combining clay and powdered glass (frit) were called
Frittenporzellan in Germany and frita in Spain. In France they were
known as pâte tendre and in England as "soft-paste". They
appear to have been given this name because they do not easily retain
their shape in the wet state, or because they tend to slump in the
kiln under high temperature, or because the body and the glaze can be
easily scratched.
Experiments at Rouen
produced the earliest soft-paste in France, but the first important
French soft-paste porcelain was made at the Saint-Cloud factory
before 1702. Soft-paste factories were established with the Chantilly
manufactory in 1730 and at Mennecy in 1750. The Vincennes porcelain
factory was established in 1740, moving to larger premises at Sèvres
in 1756. Vincennes soft-paste was whiter and freer of imperfections
than any of its French rivals, which put Vincennes/Sèvres porcelain
in the leading position in France and throughout the whole of Europe
in the second half of the 18th century.
The first soft-paste
in England was demonstrated by Thomas Briand to the Royal Society in
1742 and is believed to have been based on the Saint-Cloud formula.
In 1749, Thomas Frye took out a patent on a porcelain containing bone
ash. This was the first bone china, subsequently perfected by Josiah
Spode.
In the twenty-five
years after Briand's demonstration, a number of factories were
founded in England to make soft-paste table-wares and figures:
Chelsea (1743)
Bow (1745)
St James's (1748)
Bristol porcelain
(1748)
Longton Hall (1750)
Royal Crown Derby
(1750 or 1757)
Royal Worcester
(1751)
Lowestoft porcelain
(1757)
Wedgwood (1759)
Spode (1767)
Other developments
William Cookworthy
discovered deposits of kaolin in Cornwall, making a considerable
contribution to the development of porcelain and other whiteware
ceramics in the United Kingdom. Cookworthy's factory at Plymouth,
established in 1768, used kaolin and china stone to make porcelain
with a body composition similar to that of the Chinese porcelains of
the early 18th century.
Porcelain can be
divided into the three main categories (hard-paste, soft-paste and
bone china), depending on the composition of the paste used to make
the body of the porcelain object and the firing conditions.
Hard paste
These porcelains
that came from East Asia, especially China, were some of the finest
quality porcelain wares. The earliest European porcelains were
produced at the Meissen factory in the early 18th century; they were
formed from a paste composed of kaolin and alabaster and fired at
temperatures up to 1,400 °C (2,552 °F) in a wood-fired kiln,
producing a porcelain of great hardness, translucency, and
strength.Later, the composition of the Meissen hard paste was changed
and the alabaster was replaced by feldspar and quartz, allowing the
pieces to be fired at lower temperatures. Kaolinite, feldspar and
quartz (or other forms of silica) continue to constitute the basic
ingredients for most continental European hard-paste porcelains.
Soft paste
Soft-paste
porcelains date back from the early attempts by European potters to
replicate Chinese porcelain by using mixtures of clay and frit.
Soapstone and lime were known to have been included in these
compositions. These wares were not yet actual porcelain wares as they
were not hard nor vitrified by firing kaolin clay at high
temperatures. As these early formulations suffered from high
pyroplastic deformation, or slumping in the kiln at high
temperatures, they were uneconomic to produce and of low quality.
Formulations were later developed based on kaolin with quartz,
feldspars, nepheline syenite or other feldspathic rocks. These were
technically superior, and continue to be produced. Soft-paste
porcelains are fired at lower temperatures than hard-paste porcelain,
therefore these wares are generally less hard than hard-paste
porcelains.
Bone china
Although originally
developed in England in 1748 in order to compete with imported
porcelain, bone china is now made worldwide. The English had read the
letters of Jesuit missionary Francois Xavier d'Entrecolles, which
described Chinese porcelain manufacturing secrets in detail. One
writer has speculated that a misunderstanding of the text could
possibly have been responsible for the first attempts to use bone-ash
as an ingredient of English porcelain, although this is not supported
by researchers and historians. In China, kaolin was sometimes
described as forming the 'bones' of the paste, while the 'flesh' was
provided by the refined rocks suitable for the porcelain body.
Traditionally, English bone china was made from two parts of
bone-ash, one part of kaolin and one part china stone, although this
has largely been replaced by feldspars from non-UK sources.
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