The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  Chapter nine

  ten thousand things

  i

  No banquets tonight. I sit in my tiny room and try to catch up. I email home and the studio, make my lists for tomorrow. And start on the next bit of a novel that my daughter Anna and I are working on together. It is set on the west coast of Scotland and is good on brackish detail of wind and horizons and scrambling through burns. We’d got to a critical moment when I left London, with the two kids and their dog lost on a hillside at dusk, so it is crucial I send her my chapter, my homework.

  It is three in the morning.

  I’m racing. I am the king of all that I survey. Today, I say out loud as I crack my knuckles and stretch and look out over the deserted street in this strange city of porcelain, today I am to start to create the category of white things. I am going to be as particular as a Talmudic scholar. I am going to feel this, scrunch this up and then send this back, and ask for that one, behind you on the high shelf.

  Today I am going to find white. I am the assessor of white and nothing will get past my scrutiny.

  ii

  Sleep goes, is gone.

  I hear objects. With objects it is possible not only to sound them, name them and make sense of them through language, but hear their kinship with words themselves. Some things feel like nouns, words with physicality, shape and weight. They have a self-contained quality, a sense that you could put them down and they would displace the same amount of the world around them. Other objects are verbs and are in flux. But when I see them I hear them. A stack of bowls is a chord.

  Sometimes it is embarrassing, like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, with lots of emotional noise, and sometimes it is quite cool like a bit of Steve Reich music, with pulses of sound and with patterns emerging and disappearing.

  So I walk down this lane in Jingdezhen and there is so much porcelain, so much language, so much speech, that I get lost and it is like streams of words cascading from the top of a page endlessly.

  It is like shouting.

  And the quantities of porcelain in this place deafen. I knew that it had always been like this.

  I read that in the year 1554, the Jiajing emperor sent an order to the imperial kilns for 26,350 bowls with dragons on them in blue, 30,500 plates of the same design, 6,900 cups, white inside and blue outside decorated with blue flowers, 680 large fish bowls, decorated with blue flowers on a white ground, 9,000 teacups with foliate rims in white, 10,200 bowls decorated with lotus flowers, water plants and fish in blue and white on the outside; and on the inside with dragons and phoenixes passing through flowers, 9,800 teacups of the same pattern as above, 600 libation cups with hill saucers decorated with sea waves and dragons in clouds in blue.

  And then, that perhaps as an afterthought, as the scribe backs away, eyes down, 600 wine ewers of white porcelain.

  And that the next year he ordered 1,470 vessels, but the following year it was 34,891.

  I read the history books, the monographs, the scholarly pamphlets and they come up with answers to why all this porcelain was needed at court, but all I can hear is more, more, more.

  iii

  Surely they couldn’t break this many pots every year? I want to know where they are stored in the palace once they arrive on their journey from Jingdezhen. There must have been vast storerooms and endless inventories. There must have been rooms for the inventories. There must have been Official Counters of the Imperial Porcelain.

  Every day at court there is some religious event, an anniversary, an obligation to offer prayers or obsequies. And objects were needed for these, for libation, incense and ritual offerings of flowers or fruit. And not singular vessels, but sets of them, pairs and trios and quintets that could be placed to show how perfect and balanced and harmonious the emperor as the Son of Heaven lived and ruled.

  Page from the Collected Statutes of the Great Ming Dynasty, 1587

  There is a record of an order for hundreds of shallow dishes for narcissi, and I imagine walking down one of those endless corridors in the Forbidden City, a paced rhythm of steps and scent.

  Another imperial record orders yellow-glazed vessels for the Temple of Earth, red-glazed for the Temple of the Sun, blue for the Temple of Heaven, and white for the Temple of the Moon. The Collected Statutes of the Great Ming Dynasty from 1587 show the ceremonial vessels displayed at the Circular Mound at the Altar of the Heaven. There are three tripods in front of the altar, and then a central spine of objects with flanking censers and candlesticks, a dozen dishes to the left and a dozen to the right. And you can be sure that some officer in the department of ritual has checked the protocols, counted them from the stores, placed them as the rules indicate.

  This isn’t about things looking nice, it is about things being correct.

  Sets are a way of controlling the world. If you need this mortal world to reflect another kind of order, then things must match each other. And people must fit in. Mismatched, wayward porcelains would reflect terribly on your ancestors’ sense of the afterlife, just as much as a grubby tablecloth, or milk from the bottle rather than a jug might offend the proprieties.

  And because time is a constant interweaving of respect for ancestors, this may be the year when you send your order to the kilns to make censers for the altars that resemble those made 300 years before which in turn were made to echo bronzes 900 years before that, piety stepping down generations.

  ‘The ten thousand things are produced and reproduced / so that variation and transformation have no end’, wrote Zhou Dunyi in the eleventh century.

  This can be a beautiful idea, endless iteration.

  But at this moment I’m not an art historian and I’m not a Sinologist and I certainly feel that I can’t be a scholar of the history of Chinese porcelain either, because I am choked by porcelain as prescription, porcelain as control.

  Because every single one of these hundreds of thousands of porcelain bowls – perfect and balanced and harmonious – has cost so much. This amount of control costs more than I can comprehend. And I can be as severe as I like and cool and minimal, but this white frightens me.

  Chapter ten

  the monk’s cap ewer

  i

  After nine days here in Jingdezhen, I’m drunk on colour.

  And pattern. There is a current fashion for wearing patterned trousers – camellias, leopard print with a different-patterned top, a Manchester United T-shirt, tartan. Handbags are important and these add in quilted or snakeskin surfaces, held with golden clasps and chains, double Cs and Vs, every brand condensed to a glittering mark.

  And pots are patterned. That is they have multiple patterns on them; panels from one period held between borders of another, top-and-tailed by acanthus or clouds. And then gilded. Not simply on an edge, like an embarrassed well-behaved English dinner plate, but at the foot of the pot and the rim and where the sky might be on a blue-and-white landscape decoration, so that there are vases that are mostly gold, with figures picked out in a different gold. I’ve always loved the word ground for the surface on which you paint or decorate, the idea that you start and work up, and here are golden-ground pots. I hadn’t realised that you could put anything on top of gold. I hadn’t realised you might want to, but here gold is not an accent or an aspiration but a starting point. I walk down Porcelain Street, where the big shops spill great basins and vases over the pavements. The sun is out, briefly, amongst the summer showers. The pots glare. I stumble slightly.

  Where did white go? I pick carefully at my steamed buns in the morning and relish one white mouthful after another.

  ii

  This porcelain is as ‘blue as the sky, bright as a mirror, thin as paper, and resonant as a musical stone’. And 200 years later: this is like jade. And ‘this Kuan porcelain is generally classified as about equal to Ko porcelain. The light green colour is considered the best, the white ranked next, the ash-grey lowest. With regard to the crackling, that with lines like broken ice of the colour of eel’s blood is put first, that
like plum-blossom petals stained with ink next, fine irregular broken lines last.’ The glaze of this one is ‘marked with crab’s claw lines. The best is white in colour and bright in lustre; the inferior, yellow and coarsely worked. None of it is worth much money.’ And another 200 years later: these porcelains, says the Tao Shu, include pieces decorated with vermilion red, with bright onion green, ‘vulgarly called parrot green, and with aubergine purple. The three colours, rouge-like red, fresh onion-like bright green, and ink-like purple, when of uniformly pure colour with no stains, comprise the first class. They have inscribed underneath the numerals 1, 2 &c., to record the number of the pieces.’

  The connoisseurs sniff, categorise, rank, price, demote.

  Celadons, the colour caught between green and blue, get sky after rain, and kingfishers, and iced water, all of which are lyrical. A Tang Dynasty poem compares a service of teacups for the emperor to ‘bright moons cunningly carved and dyed with spring water / Like curling disks of thinnest ice, filled with green clouds / Like ancient moss-eaten bronze mirrors lying upon the mat / Like tender lotus leaves full of dewdrops floating on the riverside!’

  You feel the poet has only just started his evening and that there are more similes ahead.

  What can you compare white porcelain to? ‘The best is white in colour and as thin as paper. It is inferior to Ju porcelain and the value comparatively less.’ Or it can be as thin as silver. As white as driven snow. Or milk.

  It is not much to go on. I want poems that compare white porcelains to smoke coiling up from a chimney, or from incense on an altar, or mist from a valley, or, at the very least, an egret in a paddy field, poised. But the main trope on white porcelains that I can find is they are ‘as white as congealed mutton fat’.

  iii

  Poems are rare. But stories settle around those who made white pots, or commissioned them, or used them, whether they were destitute or the Son of Heaven.

  I find my destitute story first.

  ‘The porcelain fabricated at Fou-liang Hsien in the reign of Wanli by Hao Shih-chiu was of perfect design and surpassing beauty. The eggshell wine cups which he made are of translucent whiteness and delicate fabric, each one weighing not more than half a chu.’ That is, they weighed almost nothing. This maker of white porcelains, who ‘devoted all his genius to the fabrication of porcelain’, was ‘simple and not covetous of gain and used to live in a hut, with a mat for a door, and a broken jar for a window, yet he was a man of culture and not to be dismissed as celebrated for this one art only’.

  I love this.

  iv

  Then I find the story of the emperor who loved white porcelain. It is a perfect story: a tribute of jade bowls arrived for the Yongle emperor from a Muslim ruler in the Western Region at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The emperor declined the gift and ordered the Ministry of Rites to return them: ‘The Chinese porcelain that I use every day is pure white and translucent, and it pleases me greatly. There is no need to use the jade bowls.’

  I’m pleased with this shrugging away of jade in favour of austerity. But Yongle’s devotion to white becomes more complicated.

  Zhu De, the Yongle emperor, was born in 1360, the fourth of twenty-nine sons of the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty. When his father and eldest brother had died, the eldest grandson became the emperor Jianwen. At which point Zhu De marched into the capital Nanjing and started a war of unparalleled bitterness to usurp the imperial throne held by his nephew. It lasted three years.

  There are grotesque stories of the lengths to which Zhu De went to wipe out the families of his nephew’s supporters, murdering everyone within ‘nine degrees of kinship’ – grandparents, parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, children, nephews and nieces, grandchildren – before declaring himself emperor in this sea of blood. And erasing the previous reign from the records.

  He named the new reign, Yongle, or Perpetual Happiness. It was threaded with extraordinary ideas, backlit by terror.

  In the first year of his reign he issued an edict to create the first great Chinese encyclopaedia, documenting all known records, tracking down missing books and transcribing them. He moved the court from Nanjing to the old Mongol capital of Beijing and started the building of the complex of palaces and temples and gardens that would become the Forbidden City. The scale of this is barely comprehensible. Roads were flooded in winter to create ice tracks to slide cut masonry to the site. The pillars for the main halls were made from trees felled in remote south-western China and brought by boat to the city. He ordered the erection of a vast stele in memory of his father that was to stretch seventy-five metres high. Huge blocks still lie in the quarry where they were cut, too heavy to move. Emperor Yongle rebuilt the Grand Canal, stretching 1,000 miles from the old capital of Nanjing to the new capital in Beijing. He sent out huge fleets to create new trade routes to Java, Ceylon, India and East Africa. A giraffe was brought back to his court in tribute.

  And throughout this, Yongle and his empress Xu seem to have had great devotion. Guanyin, white-robed, accompanied by a white parrot, appeared to the empress in a dream, asked her to repeat a sutra three times and when she awoke she was able to transcribe the sutra in its entirety. The majority of objects created in the Imperial Workshops during his reign carry Buddhist symbols. And a bell of forty-six tons was cast with a hundred Sanskrit sutras and incantations made up of 230,000 characters, whose deep tolling was supposed to quicken the deliverance of the souls of those he had slain.

  Yongle invited the leader of the Tibetan Karmapa Order, one of the great Buddhist teachers, to visit and conduct rituals and teachings. The planning for this took years. The Karmapa was met with glory, processions of white elephants conducting him to the palace. He stayed for a year. When it came time for him to leave and start his long journey back to Tibet, laden with gifts and titles, there were portents, the clouds turning into the form of auspicious animals, perfumed rains, light emanating from the Karmapa himself, a multitude of white cranes dancing in the sky.

  And for the rituals of supplication and purification conducted by the Karmapa the purest porcelains were created. These are the monk’s cap ewers – small, strange jugs for pouring ritual libations with a stepped rim and lip based on the hats of Tibetan monks. The ewers are beaked, a great energetic thrust forward into the spout, as if the water is already in motion and the rim echoes the jagged ridge of a mountain.

  Their strangeness lies in their particularity. They are cold, held back, passionate, intense. And they are blindingly white.

  It is at this moment, with an emperor and the Karmapa locked in ritual, bringing the heavens and earth in alignment, that the first hidden porcelains are made.

  These are anhua wares, where the decoration is incised into the porcelain body so that you only catch sight of it as the vessel moves or the light changes. The glaze barely pools over these patterns, so finely are they drawn into the surface. And their quietness is coded: the patterns are of lotus scrolls, Buddhist symbols, sutras. This is white as transcendence. White as meditation.

  I’m in a museum, my forehead against the glass of the display case. A Yongle flask is slightly below me. The curators have put some bits and pieces around it, but they fade out as I try and work out this 600-year-old pot. Somewhere there has been sight of a pilgrim flask made in leather, robust enough to bang against a saddle, sling down on the ground when you stop for a rest. And this has been rethought in porcelain. This Yongle flask is a perfect disc, a full moon, held by a foot, rising to a neck, balanced by two handles, a sufficiency of movements and volume, a sort of new planet.

  Next to it is the monk’s cap ewer. I have been to my first white hill, and now, with this ewer, I have my first white pot.

  It takes me an age, but I finally realise that I saw them twenty years ago in the high white air in Tibet. That the monastery I visited was the Karmapa’s monastery and that his fierce white porcelain was still there after all these years.

  v

  Yongl
e loves white, and he also needs white. It plays a public role.

  The foundation of his reign is an act of usurpation, his legitimacy bolstered by cruelty, his place amongst his ancestors in need of consolidation. He needs to create symbols of stability, needs to surround himself with the rituals of devotion.

  He orders the building in Nanjing of the Bao-ensi, the Temple of Repaid Gratitude, in memory of his parents. It was an octagonal pagoda of nine storeys, 261 feet in height, with hundreds of bells suspended from its eaves. In its windows at night, 140 lamps glowed.

  And it was faced with white porcelain bricks from Jingdezhen, with colourful glazed tiles at each roofline, surmounted by a gilded pineapple. Each doorway and window was framed with deeply moulded ceramic tiles with complex Buddhist symbols, and each storey had its own shrine so that an ascent of the 184 steps was a pilgrimage route through divinities and saints. It was a spectacular, theatrical place of contemplation. At night when the colour of the roof tiles had faded, the whiteness of the pagoda emerged in the glow of the lamps. Imagine it by moonlight.

  White is the colour of mourning in China. To wear white is to express your loss to those around you, keep the world away. To build white on this scale is to mourn on a scale that had never been attempted before.

  This white pagoda was one of the wonders of the world, the most complex porcelain construction ever dreamt of. Two centuries after its construction the first European travellers encountered it. It evoked disbelief. The adventurer Johan Nieuhof wrote of it in his account of the Dutch embassy to China, published in 1665:

  The Ambassadors often went to take the Air and view the City: One Day they rode to see the famous Temple before-mentioned, and Plain of Pau lin shi, which contains several curious Structures … In the Middle of Plain stands a high Steeple, or Tower, made of Porcelane, which far exceeds all other Workmanship of the Chinese in Cost and Skill. It has nine Stories, and an hundred eight-four Steps to the Top: Each Story is adorned with a Gallery full of Images and Pictures, with very handsome Lights.