About author's search for the history and story of porcelain.
And it is in Venice that object and name come together and start this long history of desire for porcelain. The name of this grandest of commodities, this white gold, the cause of the bankruptcy of princes, of Porzellankrankheit - porcelain sickness - comes from eye-stretching Venetian slang, the vulgar wolf-whistle after a pretty girl. Porcellini, or little pigs, is the nickname for cowrie shells, which feel as smooth as porcelain. Cowrie shells lead, obviously, to Venetian lads, to a vulva.
You can get away with unevenness with other kinds of clay, but it is chancy with porcelain. Your errors, your slapdash decisions, are revealed.
It needs to be fired to the ridiculous temperatures above 1,300 degrees Celsius to achieve the whiteness, the hardness and the translucency, the beautiful resonance when you gently tap the rim of a bowl, that constitute proper porcelain. And this is where it gets intriguing. You cannot put a spade into the ground and dig up white porcelain clay, soft and clean and ready, however wonderful this idea might be.
Porcelain is made of two kinds of mineral.
The first element is petunse or what is known as porcelain stone. In the vivid imagery used here in Jingdezhen it provides the flesh of the porcelain. It gives translucency and supplies the hardness of the body. The second element is kaolin or porcelain clay and it is the bones. It gives plasticity. Together petunse and kaolin fuse at great heat to create a form of glass that is vitrified: at a molecule level the spaces are filled up with glass, making the vessel non-porous.
A carp rising from amongst the twisting weeds towards the air at the top of the open bowl. The word carp, li, he explains to me, is a homophone for li, profit, and this suddenly makes sense of the ubiquity of these bowls with their strenuous fish, unstoppable in their need to swim higher.
[cobalt] is toxic. If you are exposed to cobalt as dust as you grind it into a paste, if you lick the end of your brush to recover its shape before you dip it again into the blue-black liquid to paint another willow branch, you will absorb a little. You might feel nausea. You might feel breathless. It builds, it reaches deep into you.
The repetition of a previous reign's achievements is noble in itself.
Sets are a way of controlling the world.
White is the colour of mourning in China. To wear white is to express your loss to those around you, keep the world away.
Which makes me happy. I'm finally on my way to the airport and I've seen his Tea Set at last. It is perfect imperial porcelain from Jingdezhen. And I smile over the sealing up of the seam of kaolin, an action that was historicist and scholarly, and utterly lacking in utilitarian purpose.
Did they do anything else? This is a real question. The imperative to write was central to a Jesuit's mission. Wherever you were - stuck in some remote part of a country or across the city - you would write letters and reports on every aspect of your spiritual and temporal life to your superior with regularity. Writing was an act of self-reflection, a catechising of yourself before God. You write and you send. And you wait.
There is a silk handscroll portrait of Lang sitting on a rock over a ravine in a pale blue robe that bunches up over his impressive paunch, leaning on one hand, the other nonchalant on a knee, and he radiates capaciousness. You look at him and think conversation. You look again and you see his astuteness. He knows the drop to his left.
And the glaze named 'drunken beauty' in China, or 'peach bloom' by a Western scholar, softens the form even more. I don't want to think of the late-night glowing pallor of a drunk, so think of a peach. Really think of it, how the colour changes from yellow to pinks, blooms as imperceptibly as dawn, how the fruit gives slightly under your thumb. This glaze, too, is ludicrously difficult to achieve. Copper-lime pigment has to be sprayed through a long bamboo tube with a fine silk covering at the end on to a layer of transparent glaze, on to which you then put another layer of transparent glaze, before you fire it.
These effects are perfect for an emperor.
Kangxi is late porcelain. It is clever and it knows it. It is, I realize, an idea of porcelain.
And Primo Levi, my hero, wrote in The Wrench of 'the advantage of being able to test yourself, not depending on others in the test, reflecting yourself in your work. On the pleasure of seeing your creature grow, beam after beam, bolt after bolt, necessary, symmetrical, suited to its purpose.'
By which Primo Levi, a chemist who spent his working life analysing the chemical composition of paint as well as being a writer, means that method is interesting. Be very careful when you describe how something is made, how it comes into shape, as process is not to be skated over. The manner of what we make defines us.
Kakiemon. This is the Japanese porcelain that is being imported through the Dutch, who since the 1630s, have the only concessions to trade with the Japanese.
I realise that they are all scared about money. Each of them feels poor. They have every right to feel worried too, as money isn't simple at court. I had imagined that the court functioned with the king paying wages or salaries, but it is more fragile than that, a series of binding ad hoc agreements, throwaway remarks and whimsy backed up by threat.
How can there have been so many documents from these weeks, 300 years ago? Reading Stasiland, Anna Funder's exploration of the culture of informing and information in the GDR, it is striking how fear drives the compulsion to keep records. If you know that everyone around you is recording what you have said, who you said it to, then self-protection lies in the completeness of your notes, the reach for a pen as automatic as the tapping of a cigarette from a packet, lighting it, inhaling.
And there is a constant about alchemists. They seem to be aware of their solitary nature while making a big deal of the handing on of knowledge, the choosing of who to pass it on to, adopting initiates. This idea of the transmission from Albertus Magnus to Thomas Aquinas to Paracelsus and on, is compelling. A writer at the start of the seventeenth century notes that 'you will find [the alchemist's] primary transmutation to be of himself: a goldsmith becomes a goldmaker, an apothecary a chemical physician, a barber a Paracelsian, one who wastes his own patrimony turns into one who spends the gold and goods of others.
Tschirnhaus comes to understand haptic knowledge, the ways in which it is possible to know something complex without having the need, or the means, to articulate it in language, 'a person can perform intellectual and other operations without knowing how they actually work.'
Tschirnhaus frequently gives the example of the way in which we use our hands without any knowledge of their physiological structure. Thus we can admire the manual ability and skill of a watchmaker who does not know anything at all about the way in which his hands function, but is still creating an object of true complexity.
