The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

This feels correct for the experience of working with cobalt. You have it right, a blue as clean and lambent as midday and you try it again and it is as turbid as late afternoon before the rain.

  Local sources of cobalt near Jingdezhen were tried with disappointing results. ‘Collectors go out and gather it and wash away the earth that sticks to it in streams. It is dark yellow in colour.’ Once it has been purified it is still ‘thin in colour and doesn’t fire well, so it is only used for low-quality popular wares’. Cobalt came in all kinds of grades, all colours, brought to the town by merchants ‘to sell as speculation’, some higher in iron, some in manganese, and it needed interminable amounts of work to make it usable, wash out the impurities.

  Cobalt was the source of endless trouble.

  Firstly, it was ludicrously valuable. It still is. My Kilner jar of cobalt oxide has been constant over my working life, a couple of kilos bought thirty years ago and jealously guarded. I’ve used it to attempt to inscribe blue lines into porcelain, give a blue rim to a bowl, colour a glaze. The level has barely gone down. In Jingdezhen decorators were tested to see how economical they could be. One administrator tried to make his decorators work with their hands through a kind of wooden stocks to prevent pilfering. Père d’Entrecolles noticed that paper was placed ‘under the stand on which the vase is being painted … nothing is lost’, the stray grains tapped from the paper at the end of the day, like gold on a goldsmith’s bench.

  Secondly, it is a material that has to be calcined, that is heated to red hot, either in a crucible in a kiln or on a stove, and then ground carefully in a large porcelain mortar. Here in this room, the system for preparation is no different than that used 300 years ago.

  ‘Those who keep working till midnight are paid double. The aged and very young, the lame and sick, get a living by this work.’ It reaches deep into the economy of the city.

  And thirdly, it 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.

  This afternoon in the factory as we talk cobalt, we talk of all the complexities, all the trouble and expense it brings with it, except this.

  iv

  Cobalt allows the world to be turned into stories.

  There is a list of Names of Designs from the eighth year of the Jiajing emperor, AD 1529 – a particularly unpleasant emperor – to be given to decorators in Jingdezhen. These designs include:

  Dragons in pursuit of pearls, gold-weighing scales, playing boys, sporting dragons rising and descending, phoenixes flying through flowers, floral scrolls covering the whole ground, birds flying in the sky, the eight immortals crossing the sea, lions playing with embroidered balls, the four fish ch’ing, p’o, li, and kuei with waterweeds, waterfalls of the Pa Shan mountains, flying lions, waves and flames supporting the eight mystic diagrams, storks flying in clouds, children playing games, phoenixes rising into clouds of propitious omen.

  The list becomes increasingly florid with each interior and exterior possibility adumbrated before giving up in exasperation, ‘in a short summary like this it is impossible to give a complete list of all the different designs’.

  Grinding cobalt, Jingdezhen, 1938

  Everything is in motion, activity captured through cobalt across and around and beneath the porcelain, with ribbons and clouds and waves, falling water or a gust of wind propelling the stories.

  And it seems natural that the world should be refracted into blue and white. The whiteness of the spaces on porcelain can become anything you want, water or sky, the heft of a mountain or the face of a child.

  Stories might begin in China, start with the images and names that make up who you are, but as the orders come into Jingdezhen from Ulan Bator, Isfahan, Constantinople, Madrid, Amsterdam, Bristol you start to paint characters and scenes that come to you as sketches and descriptions.

  And so you paint pagodas and carp and phoenixes, but you also paint English country houses, and churches and coats of arms, the crucifixion, inscriptions in Persian and Arabic, carnations and tulips, mottos in Latin and knights in armour and Andromeda.

  v

  A decorator doesn’t sit and suck the end of his brush, lean back and ponder the empty vessel, wondering where the river should flow, where the clouds should bank, the fishes swim. Blue-and-white porcelain is, and always has been, a process with many hands. This means skills in many hands. And this in turn means administration, decision-making, planning.

  If you can repeat an object with some exactitude then you can send one as a sample, take orders for another. If you can work out how much each bowl costs to produce in porcelain, cobalt, firing and wages, factor in wastage, make sense of transport out of the city, then you are on the way to standardisation. Standardising helps everything. It helps the man at the wheel, the man who trims the pots, the man who carries the boards to the drying racks, pushes these stem cups into the glaze, runs a thumb over the fall of glaze. It helps when you pack pots into saggars, saggars into kilns. And on and on. Each stage is simpler. Each movement more fluent.

  ‘One piece goes through seventy hands’, says sharp-eyed Père d’Entrecolles, ‘… there can be no intermission in the work’.

  The Tao Shu is more brutal:

  the different kinds of round ware painted in blue are each numbered by hundreds and thousands, and if the painted decoration be not exactly alike … the service will be neither regular nor uniform. For this reason, the men round the border of the pieces and the blue bands are entrusted to the workers who sketch the outlines, learn how to design, not how to paint in colours, while those who fill in the colours are taught colouring, not designing, by which means the hand becomes skilful in one art work and the mind is not distracted.

  Repetition needs you not to think, not to wander as you lay this line down and lift your brush at exactly the right moment, turn the flat edge of a brush to make the hard edge of the grass stem, dip it back into the cobalt, repeat.

  And by making one man do grasses, only grasses, the numbers of mistakes drop. You can also identify where things are going wrong and who to punish.

  It is difficult to believe that this is how these pots are created. I look at a favourite blue-and-white flask from the early fifteenth century of a bird on a branch. It is a fat little flask, and the bird is singing, and there is so much space for the branch and leaves and the song that I don’t see how it could be the outcome of anything more than a singular hand, judging the pauses, allowing a brush to lift slightly at the end of the bough, return over the tail feathers so that the cobalt stipples slightly, ruffled.

  There is the boy doing the beards at the other end of the studio. He has half a dozen of the sages on the mountain vases with no faces. Someone else has done the banding, the laying down of the structure of lines that creates the spaces, and someone the mountains. There is practically no one here this afternoon, so I cannot meet the lotus-scroll lady, nor the five-toed-dragon painter. I don’t see the moment when all their meticulous labour disappears under a shroud of white glaze, ready for the kiln.

  vi

  I’ve got to go. I have a dinner appointment tonight with an archivist and I cannot be late, but I find it difficult to leave. I pass the racks of glazed pots ready to be stacked into the kilns early on Monday morning.

  There is something miraculous about the process. I’m with my Jesuit on this. He notes that cobalt lines are a pale black when first painted on to the pot, then they disappear under the glaze, ‘but the fire makes it appear in all its beauty, almost in the same way as the natural heat of the sun makes the most beautiful butterflies, with all their tints, come out of their eggs’.

  He has seen the work involved, the handing of a bowl from one person to another and the diminishment this entails, but he wants something different – a story of creation,
of freedom, individuation.

  He is not alone in this. The fire transforms in ways that are not completely explicable. There is a stele dedicated to the god of kilns: ‘looking in the kilns with its strong fire, one often sees insects, which must be gods in disguise, moving in shimmering pure water’. There are records of porcelain that ‘came out of the kiln with marks produced in the furnace upon the proper glaze, in the shape of butterflies, birds, or fish, unicorns or leopards, or with the colour of the glaze changed to yellow, red, or brown, and how the new forms and colours were sometimes most lovely spontaneous creations of the fire’.

  Chapter eight

  Counterfeit. Forgery. Sham.

  i

  Six in the morning and my guide tells me I’m too late. This has to be a universal truism for anyone going to any market and it is always annoying. The best bit of the day, said my mother, was just before you got up, and it still rankles.

  There was more Maotai last night. I’d forgotten what it is to be on someone else’s expense account, in China.

  This is the Monday antiques market, more than 200 people sitting or squatting on the ground with their wares in front of them, some on cloth, some on red cloth, some on red cloth with brocade and others straight on to the concrete. It is packed. Behind the sellers are their bicycles, scooters and carts. Threaded with buyers haggling, picking over the pots and arguing, fingers in the air, counting and discounting. The man with the steamed rice cakes is shouting too and just because it is a market, it doesn’t stop scooters with horns weaving their way through. An entrepreneur has a microphone and a single scroll of tigers and is in full cry. A crowd surrounds him, drawn to the static of his energy, unimpressed.

  An elderly man sits with his stacks of Sung Dynasty tea bowls around him like the hours on a clock face. They are all here in this market, the storied bowls, named in poems, copied and desired. There is a stack of bowls streaked like hare’s fur, and the strange oil-spot glazes where silvery droplets of lead seem to float on the surface of the lustrous black. And my favourite bowls with partridge-feather markings. This man in his Atlanta Braves tracksuit has six.

  And there are dozens of white porcelain monk’s cap ewers, the Sung pitchers with a jagged profile edge that sell for millions in Hong Kong auctions. A sharp young woman hustling Mao plaques and Long March platters tries to get my attention. Westerners love a bit of Cultural Revolution.

  And there is a child with stones. Not scholars’ stones, the jagged, ragged striated stones that sat on erudite writers’ desks for contemplation, but twenty rounded river stones. He must be eight years old. He squats next to his stones and waits.

  Last year, says my guide, you could buy the rejects of Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds in this market for 200 yuan a kilo, little conical heaps of grey seeds that he had commissioned from the small workshops of Jingdezhen for his vast installation at the Tate Modern in London. They were press-moulded by the million, and you could go and collect a bag of them from a depot and paint a stripe of iron along each side and get paid by weight. There were 100 million made, 150 tons of seeds, and they kept workshops busy for a couple of years.

  This year you can’t find Ai Weiwei seeds.

  ii

  This morning there are dozens and dozens of people with piles of shards, each kind separated and zoned, by size, by dynasty, by colour. Celadons from white wares, deep black glazes from the rarer textured glazes, broken spouts and foot rings of bowls and pots still in saggars. There are thousands and thousands of blue-and-white fragments of pattern with the calligraphic reign marks on the base. Fish, peonies, figures. The leaning figure crossing the bridge. The boy bent into the river breeze on the boat. Three geese arced near the rain cloud. Some grasses in the wind. Quick repeated dashes of brush and cobalt again and again.

  And because shards come from vessels and so are all slightly curved these swathes of brokenness ripple across the concrete like a piece of cloth lifting in a breeze.

  You buy for research. You haggle for this fragment because it shows you how deep to incise this combed sweep of a willow branch and how shallow a foot on a bowl should be. You buy these blue-and-white shards because the cluster of characters inside the well of a foot tell you when the pot was made: they indicate the reign of an emperor. They have value because you can make a new vase or bowl and insert these characters into your creation and fire it very slowly and you have made a homage worth fifty times what your ordinary pot would make.

  My guide takes me for noodles and then on to the street of reproductions. It is opening up already. It is seven feet across, tight with workshops and stores, a woman with her barrow of chillies pushing through. It starts with a bang, a store selling nothing but imperial yellow, five-toed-dragon porcelain, and a cheerful young woman nursing her baby while the deep store blazes with every coveted stem cup, vase and dish stacked eight deep on the shelves. I stumble a little after several hundred yards of what seem to be impeccable Qing porcelains when I come across a run of shops selling twelfth-century porcelains, each of the famous glaze effects in bulk. So what do you want? How much do you want? You want that smoky blue-and-white where the glazes have run and it looks like a landscape in the rain?

  I buy seven Tang bowls for $5 each. They have been properly aged.

  This is skill, another skill. I watch as a man dips a fat old brush in red clay slip and washes it over the bases of his olive-green jars until it gathers and encrusts in the hot air into that crumbly just-dug-up way. A few shops down there is a haphazard pile of cups and jars – sixteenth-century porcelains from last week – over which a man is splashing an acid solution. It bites into the glaze and abrades it in a usefully random way.

  This level of authenticity – the grasses matted to the insides of my bowls, the cloacal dirt deep in the seams of these gorgeous celadons that I’m coveting and wondering how to get home – is a fabulous flowering of how the market works.

  We can do authenticity if authenticity is what you want.

  Someone has fired vases into saggars for those who like a bit of rough around their porcelain. I look approvingly at them. There are shops as full as the trenches of the terracotta warriors.

  iii

  No one is here for aesthetics. They are here to make a living, walking skilfully along a pathway between reproduction and – what is the correct word – fraud? Fakes?

  Well, neither of those. This could not be more complex in a country where copying is a valued pathway of respect, a way of learning skills. The repetition of a previous reign’s achievements is noble in itself.

  And anyway, I add under my breath, I’ve been trying to make these kinds of pots for decades. That crackle glaze has never come right for me. I would have given anything to have been able to create a bowl like that one, let alone repeat it.

  I look at my notes and they are lists, crossed out, repeated, failed attempts at taxonomies for all these reproductions. Objects that resemble X / reproductions of Y / acts of homage to Z. Each of these is a kind of story.

  Fake. Fraud. Ersatz. Bogus. Replica. Simulacrum. Counterfeit. Forgery. Sham. How do you make anything at all, map your desire to create a beautiful porcelain bowl, if it is caught up with something made last year, a hundred years ago or 1,000?

  This street, on a humid July afternoon, jostles with histories. Stop anywhere, allow your eye to pause and you are sold an idea, a chance, a discussion. And after a week here in Jingdezhen, I realise this is what I am starting to love in the Tao Shu, this anthology of writings on porcelain from over two hundred years ago. Everything is included in this scrapbook on porcelain; unspooling lists of the great pots of past dynasties, secret glazes, stories of who had this and how it was passed on, shuffling anecdotes, sniping at previous scholars. I find more and more reassurance in its randomness, the way in which total authority is given to one list of objects or attributes, only to be countered angrily by the next.

  Nothing touches this energetic storytelling by Chinese scholars on their pots.

&
nbsp; Stories of the strange life of porcelain thread the literature.

  A man comes down on a cold morning to discover that when he emptied a porcelain basin, the water remaining at the bottom was frozen, and he saw a spray of peach blossom. On the next morning there appeared a branch of peony with two flowers. ‘On the next day a winter landscape was formed, filling the basin, with water and villages of bamboo houses, wild geese flying, and herons standing upon one leg, all as complete as a finished picture … The pictures have never been twice alike.’

  A man sent a teacup ‘as a present to a poor friend, who after his return home prepared tea and poured it into the cup, whereupon there immediately appeared a pair of cranes, which flew out of the cup and circled round it, and only disappeared when the tea was drunk’.

  I know all these stories from the inside, own each emotional adjustment as I learnt to make something I could love. As a teenager I pinned a postcard above the wheel in the studio. It was of a celadon tea bowl with a crackle as fine as a skeletal leaf. And I tried to make it again and again, hoping for the moment when it would come to life and cranes would fly out of it.

  iv

  My seven old and new, priceless $5 Tang Dynasty tea bowls from last week, barely wrapped in newspaper, bump in their plastic bag as I walk back to my lodgings through the soft early evening rain. I’m wondering how to write about this city. The interweaving of histories makes it so difficult to work out which tense to write in; the past isn’t very past here, and the present, bumping in my bag, is very, very old. Tenses are fluid and difficult to police.

  And there are so many stories that a scrapbook seems the only way of collecting them, a sort of plastic bag for them to bump along together.

  By the time I get back I find I’ve broken one of my seven new Tang Dynasty bowls already. New shards can’t be bad, I think, as I add them to my collection on the windowsill in my hostel.