The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  The grandmother leads me to the shed, thirty feet long with a kiln and high shelves, takes a bowl and taps it. The sound of the bowl is like a picture of sound waves in the air, it makes a shape through the grey morning. We listen to one bowl and then to another.

  She smiles. It is perfect.

  And my driver leans on his horn from the street. This is a working city. There is nothing to do, he says, but gamble. Choose mah-jong, cards, or porcelain you’ll lose. He is in a spectacularly bad mood, worse than yesterday. Either way you’ll lose, he repeats, and hawks.

  Chapter five

  how to make big pots

  i

  I visit the big-pot factory early in the morning.

  The owner of the big-pot factory, upstream from the city, looks like a Brechtian capitalist, someone painted in Weimar. He is big too, and rolls on his feet assessingly when he meets you and you know he knows you know this. He wears cargo shorts and smokes small cigars.

  The courtyard of his factory is crowded with seven- and eight-feet tall blue-and-white porcelain jars. They are narrow-necked and because I have taken against him I look at them and see constriction, breathlessness, a tightness in the decoration, meritriciousness in their perfection. I see them in pairs in Shanghai hotels with mirrors behind them and marble underfoot. Or in casinos. Possibly brothels.

  I spend the day here, avoiding him. It is so humid that the flies roll through the thick air from the latrine in the fetid alley.

  In the early afternoon a lassitude steals in. The dogs stop fighting. The kiln man is asleep, curled up by the door in front of the cooling kiln, his hat across his face, an arc of cigarette butts around him. In the decoration workshop the dozen kids painting, stencilling designs, carving are behind with their day’s work but cannot care. Someone comes in and yells and leaves. The desultory talk resumes. They get 900 yuan a month, a girl explains, and she gives almost all to her mother. She keeps money for cigarettes. A single packet costs twenty but you can get them in cartons with the other girls for fifteen. It is her mobile that really costs.

  She is pricking out with red ink a landscape of cool mountains with mist entwined around the peaks and someone auspicious walking along a track very, very slowly with a crooked stick.

  The man who joins the parts of the large pots is on piecework, not on a wage. He is paid for finished jars he works on. If they crack in drying, it is his fault and he doesn’t get paid. If they crack in firing or are over-fired, so the decoration runs in gouts of cobalt, washing dozens of hours into abstraction, or if someone knocks a pot over in the yard whilst tying bamboo around it for transport, it is someone else’s problem. Because he works on through the afternoon, three other men have to stay nearby to lift the next thrown section up. A skinny shirtless man sits near the gate. His job is to smoke and to yell to the other labourers to come from whatever they are doing and lift.

  Each section has to be dampened slightly, a fat brush dipped into water and held against the flank of the pot, and then trimmed with a curved steel blade. He holds it at an angle to the turning clay and dry clay dust geysers up and over his arms. He is shadowed in dust.

  My father and grandfather did this, he tells me, but I don’t want my son to follow me.

  The next section is lifted up in a flurry of invective to each other to straighten it the fuck up. He works at making the joins disappear, the curve from base to the over-constricted neck, seamless. He does it very well. The ground around his wheel is yellow with porcelain dust, ankle-deep.

  ii

  Making big pots out of porcelain is something that shouldn’t be possible. It is a material that likes to buckle and joining different sections compounds the issue, as any seam is inherently weaker. If you join two parts poorly, one bulges slightly like a stomach over a belt. It is not a good look. If there is any structural weakness lower down, the whole jar will tilt in the kiln or topple and take out surrounding vessels. Or break, so that the fire mouth is blocked and the firing is a disaster, flames pushed in strange directions, intensifying the heat.

  Every potter knows this but the lure of making something vast out of porcelain seems unending. It is hubris. The Tao Shu records that:

  The father of the reigning emperor ordered some boxes, three and a half feet long and two and a half feet high, and the bottom was to be half a foot thick and the sides a third of a foot. They worked on these pieces for three consecutive years, and made nearly 200 examples, not one of which was successful … All these, said the old people of Jingdezhen, cannot be done, and the Mandarins of the province presented a petition to the emperor supplicating him to stop the work.

  The cost of trying repeatedly to make these huge vessels cascades.

  Imagine the amount of kaolin and petunse, the effort to compound that quantity of raw clay, knead it for the throwers. The throwing of such large vessels requires not only great strength but great skill, as a wobble when throwing a wine cup can be changed without thinking, but on this scale nothing can be altered until the clay returns to your fingers. And that feels an age as you see the slight ripple where you moved too quickly gaining movement, the fault coming back to you, increasing.

  iii

  For a few years in my thirties I became obsessed with throwing very large porcelain dishes and very tall porcelain jars. Few worked. I managed to drop one pulling it from the kiln. My memory is of held breath.

  While clay is still in a plastic state you can alter form, rethink. And so, sometimes pleasingly, you find the moments when pragmatism intervenes. ‘In the reign of Shên Miao, Jingdezhen was called upon to make a windscreen. It failed and turned into a bed six feet long and one foot high. And this changed again into a ship three feet long complete with tackle.’ This sixteenth-century note adds that ‘The district and prefectural officials both saw it but hammered it to pieces not daring to forward it to the palace.’

  Windscreen to bed to ship to shards, and then into story.

  It is what artists do. J. M. W. Turner’s painting of the arrival of King Louis-Philippe in Portsmouth harbour became his Whalers (Boiling Blubber) Entangled in Flaw Ice, Endeavouring to Extricate Themselves. You paint over the martyr, paint in a lover and retitle. The ode on mourning becomes a lyric on spring. You drop the lid of the huge lidded jar that you have finally made and it becomes ‘Jar for a Branch’. And you move on.

  So when you have your basin, your jar, you must let it dry very, very slowly. Any dampness deep in the walls will crack the whole vessel as it is fired. There are records of pieces left to dry for a year, in itself a skill in this valley of great heat and great cold. Then there is the decoration and all this is before the firing itself, at which point all the work, the hundreds on hundreds of hours, are as chaff in the wind. You watch as it is placed in the chamber on fine sand and the kiln mouth bricked up. And the best brushwood laid in the firebox and lit, the soft crackle as the firemen warm the kiln as tenderly as they can. Firing pots like this should be measured, as slow as is possible to allow the great vessels to temper to the increasing heat, the building of tempo over the couple of days until there is nothing but fire.

  When the final test ring is pulled and the glaze judged to have reached its moment, every aperture in the brick wall at the kiln mouth is clammed with wet clay so that there are no fissures to let in a breath of cold air. The kiln might take a week or ten days to cool.

  And then you unbrick the kiln. You unpack. And you begin again.

  There are many vivid stories about the true cost of making big pots. The most famous is of a young man who, seeing that these great porcelain vessels would not go right, threw himself into the kiln, ‘whereupon the bowls were finished’. This self-sacrificial youth was Pousa. He gained great posthumous fame for his actions and is ‘universally known in the town … there are images of him in many workshops, looking down from shelves’.

  Pousa is ‘the idol who watches over the workers in porcelain’. This ubiquity is noticed by Père d’Entrecolles forgivingly as he journeys t
hrough his city of possible converts.

  My photocopy of his letters now resembles a palimpsest. I’ve underlined almost everything, and written notes slant-ways on his comments, in taxis and on my knee in the street and leaning against trees. There are stains. Possibly noodles. I hope he’d understand, but I’m not confident about Jesuits and untidiness.

  Chapter six

  obligations

  Pousa is a singularly depressing guardian angel for us potters. But an appropriate one as he brings money and failure up really close and personal.

  I’m here in a semi-official role. My curation of the exhibition has been misinterpreted into my being A Curator of a Western Museum: Exhibition of Jingdezhen Porcelain. Somehow I’ve become an opportunity to be seized.

  Once this is known, I’m upgraded. I get a driver with a golden Mao on his dashboard, a driver who doesn’t spit. This morning I have an interpreter, an interpreter’s shadow, a man taking a video, the Cultural Bureau chief, someone from the university. I find myself asking someone if they’ve come far, like a parodic diplomat. ‘Porcelain’, I offer over toasts of Maotai, the pungent and powerful Chinese vodka, at lunch, ‘is cultural glue.’ I have no idea why I say this and I’m not sure how this is being translated and the bewilderment lasts another round of clinked cups until we agree that if everyone came here, to this city and saw this, then we would have understanding, as porcelain is the road of peace.

  Our little motorcade drives slowly around the campus of the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute. It is the biggest porcelain campus in the world, they confide to me. It is completely empty as it’s the summer holidays, so it feels like the setting for a dystopian movie. Or a horror film. It’s been a long day.

  Over another meal, shortly after the first meal, I’m shown the Gift. It is the design for the metre-high porcelain vase to be given to the Queen of England to celebrate her diamond jubilee. It is to be yellow, in the shape of a close-fitting robe with six red roses scattered over it, supported on a frieze of ancient Chinese characters that read something symbolic of longevity.

  It is tact or politeness that makes me start to say that I admire its skill, but then I run out of steam on this sentence. And the main man, a man with a business card that actually folds out to list in tiny characters the manifoldness of his public achievements, knows I’m lying.

  I’m lying because skill is so important because it belongs to someone and this man in his leather jacket is going to screw the skills of so many people to get this Gift done, and fold the credit into the shiny purple lining of his shiny black jacket. Just as he did to get the Hong Kong Gift made. This was to celebrate the return of Hong Kong from being a British territory to China in 1997. A thin porcelain plaque 1.997 metres square had to be made, glazed and painted ‘by me’. This was something that was on the edge of impossibility. The shrinkage could be calculated exactly and the clay could be rolled perfectly – I’ve seen it done by three men and a scaffolding pole in a backstreet workshop in the city – but if it was fired flat on a huge kiln shelf then it would crack. So massive resources were ‘made available’ and a way of firing the plaque on its side was discovered.

  This is how it is always done here. How it always was done.

  In this new China there is money, an aquifer of cash just below the surface of the city. You sink your borehole here and it is dry, but you try again there and it gushes and gushes. It could be big pots. Or it could be an exhibition in a museum abroad or a new role in a development corporation. It could be that you become president of the local chamber of porcelain manufacturers, a prefectural superintendent, but what it means is that someone now owes you and that you can now afford to build yourself a house with an atrium like a museum in the Midwest, and you are covering the facade with shards.

  Somewhere in this long day of meetings and toasts and presentations I feel I’ve done something or said something and now I owe them, and will be folded, carefully, into obligation.

  Chapter seven

  Factory #72

  i

  The city gets more complicated day by day.

  Actually, hour by hour.

  I’ve just been told of a man who makes blue-and-white porcelain because he wants to. My friend emphasises this. I have to meet the man who chooses what to make in a city full of people who don’t have any choice, who never had choice. I’m still reflecting on the brutal economics of paying for broken work from your meagre wages, when all this work is fragile.

  His factory is on the site of Factory 72. Under huge rusted gates with an old broken-down guard post on the left as you come in. You bump along and turn up by a run of derelict workshops, stop by a midden, piles of stinking rubbish by the front entrance.

  A boy with his laptop open in front of him, headphones on and a soap opera silently playing, is painting a Tang landscape where three sage men with beards, talking of love or loss, sit amongst rocks. I watch for half an hour. His brush stipples two of the three beards.

  It is a Sunday afternoon and there are few sounds in this dusty space. A woman blowing gently into each glazed bowl before it is set on its stand in the kiln. The softness of the clink as the carrier pushes the porcelain down the alleyway to the kiln on her barrow with the two bicycle wheels. An elderly man grinding the feet of finished jars to remove any traces of roughness, picking each jar up from a board on his left, twisting it against an abrasive wheel of carborundum, wiping it, placing it on his right.

  ii

  Laughter from the office where the owner, a slight man in his sixties, sits and makes red tea in a complex ceremony of warming, pouring, discarding and pouring again. Behind him are shelves of books on porcelain. He is a first-generation potter, he tells me, and so has learnt properly, chosen what he is doing. He is obsessed by cobalt and dismisses the stuff you can buy from the shit-merchants in town. He loves ‘heaped and piled’, the blue decoration of the Yuan Dynasty when the blue deepens towards black when the painter has left the brush for a second too long, a carp rises from amongst 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.

  He looks completely delighted that I didn’t know.

  He draws a folio from the shelves and opens it at a photograph of a pair of temple vases, the kind of porcelain jar I’ve always hated – pointless, stiff-necked, two handles high up – and tells me that this is his next project.

  It is the David vases and I’ve known them for thirty-five years. I first saw them in the Percival David Collection, a stuffy townhouse in a Bloomsbury square where you had to ring a bell and sign in under a scowling gaze. I felt I was there amongst the treasures by sufferance. I loved the early Sung pots and lingered, but these vases had their own cases, exuding significance on account of their size and inscriptions and date of 1351 on which scholars have balanced, tremulous with suggestion and surmise, their reputations.

  These jars are everything jars. You want dragons pursuing a pearl through clouds? Waves? Peonies? Phoenix? Plantain? Elephant handles? Perhaps you want your name inscribed two and a half feet high at the top? The inscription reads:

  Chang Wen-chin of Te-hsiao lane in the village of Hsin-chou, is happy to present an altar set of an incense burner and vases as a prayer for the protection of the whole family and for the peace and prosperity of his descendants. Recorded on a lucky day in the fourth month of the eleventh year of Chih-chen.

  They are unwieldy, freighted. I gave these as needy as the donor names in gold strung over a museum doorway.

  The owner of the factory explains that his market used to be Japanese high-end department stores, but there is now rapidly increasing interest from rich Chinese buyers. The skill is to make replicas of iconic wares, named pieces, bowls and jars from the great collections, and to make them really well, hence the David vases, soon to be recreated in their dozens, and sold possibly
as trios, quartets. And that means getting the cobalt correct for each kind of vessel – for these vases the colour is bright, but there are places where there are difficulties ahead. The elephants are a wash of colour, very difficult to recreate, as the cobalt can look like a badly painted wall. There is no singular blue that can be used across his factory. He is a lexicon of blue.

  His pots come from over 700 years of history, from the start of the Yuan Dynasty, halfway through the thirteenth century, to the very end of the Qing Dynasty in 1912. He takes me to his grinding room. It is tiny and airless with a table and three chairs, a little how I imagine a Swiss bank vault to look.

  iii

  Cobalt is an exalted material.

  It was first used as a pigment at the start of the fourteenth century, imported from the mines near Kashan in Persia, down the Persian Gulf, across the Indian Ocean, to the port of Aceh on Sumatra and then on to the port of Quanzhou. It arrived either as pure cobalt oxide – difficult to transport – or as smalt, a compound of cobalt with glass that can be ground down, a process that diminishes the chance of the colour running under the glaze.

  This cobalt was the source of stories of fortunes made and lost:

  It is said that a porcelain merchant, having been wrecked on a desert coast, found there more riches than he had lost. While he was roaming about the shore, and his servants were making a small vessel out of the remains of the ship, he perceived stones fit to make the most beautiful blue were common there. He took with him a big load, and they say that such a beautiful blue had never been seen at Jingdezhen. Later on the Chinese merchant tried in vain to find the coast where chance had sent him.