The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

New stuff from China.

  Chapter fourteen

  the emperor’s Tea Set

  i

  I’m going home. I’m done.

  I spent this morning interviewing two elderly men. They were both sculptors and both had created figures of Mao during the Cultural Revolution. It was an extraordinary few hours. I hope I can read my notes.

  We are on the way to the airport. I hate to be late, really hate it, but my driver with his golden Mao is sanguine.

  We stop in what might possibly be yet another research facility that the East Germans started and abandoned. I’m hopeful that there might be a plaque or a picture of First Secretary Walter Ulbricht. Name cards are swapped and amongst all the kitsch – vast porcelain vases with kittens – I catch sight of Mao’s imperial Tea Set.

  This is a great moment for me.

  The Tea Set – it demands capitals – consists of an ovoid teapot, teacups on saucers, a sugar bowl, a coffee pot and a wine ewer and eight wine cups, some cake plates and a cake stand. All in bright, radiant, good morning revolutionary-white with candy-pink sprays of peach blossom across each one. It is New Dawn, Great Leap Forward Porcelain, and it is unaffectedly suburban. That is, it doesn’t look cheap, it looks Proper.

  It looks like how the best china should look, something to put into a glass cabinet and bring out for guests. Nixon perhaps. Cup of tea, Mr President? A cake? Milk?

  The story is this. Mao liked presents, like every emperor before him. And Jingdezhen, having offered tributes in the form of many hundreds of thousands of Mao busts, ceramic badges and plates with happy workers wending their way home from the steel mills, had yet to receive a specific request or commission from the Great Leader. So in the late 1960s the Jiangxi party started to think about what would be appropriate. A new seam of clay of startling purity had been discovered in Fuzhou in Jiangxi Province and this was mined, refined and prepared. Instructions were issued to the Jiangxi provincial party committee for the creation of ‘new wares’.

  Nothing was more important; the mission was assigned the number 7,501. It was Year Zero One for Jingdezhen.

  The records tremble with anxiety. ‘The organisation and management of the project is extremely tight. All personnel involved in the project have had strict political examination.’ Checkpoints were set up.

  Very quickly there was panic. The ten tons of raw materials were found to be insufficient and Red Guards were transferred to the project to speed up the refining. No one was allowed to rest and home leave was cancelled. Technical problems were judged as indicative of insufficient regard for the Leader. This is a crime punishable with death.

  Then came the agonising decision about what they could make. Objects that were neither historicist (see what we have lost), nor scholarly (do you know what this unusual glaze is Comrade?). The porcelain could not be overtly decorative either. This was a revolution, so no vases and no goldfish bowls.

  So it had to be useful and skilful and new: a tea set.

  Twenty-two kilns were fired over the next six months and two sets of 138 pieces were finally delivered to Mao’s compound in Beijing in early September 1975. He approved.

  Mao died a year later. And the special seam of clay was sealed up for ever.

  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.

  ii

  On the plane back to Shanghai there is so much porcelain carried on by the passengers – in brocade boxes and wrapped in newspaper in plastic bags – that the overhead lockers are filled and the lavatory is requisitioned to store it.

  I sit next to a charming man who works for the Pakistani air force who is on a six-week tour of military facilities. Jingdezhen makes helicopters, he tells me. He has bought a model for his five-year-old son, who he misses terribly, and shows me photographs of the boy clowning around for his father in bright sunshine. Then I realise why dozens of model AC313 helicopters have also been brought on board.

  I’d missed the helicopter side to the city. He’d missed the porcelain.

  Part two

  Versailles – Dresden

  Chapter fifteen

  the latest news from China

  i

  I’m back in London. I unpack my six intact bowls bought in the market, the shards picked up on the hillside, my lump of kaolin from my first white hill and arrange them on my desk. I shuffle them: the life history of an object.

  And I’m full of plans for my second hill, my second white pot, the next part of my journey following the trail of porcelain. I need to get to Dresden, the city in which the mysteries of porcelain were uncovered at the start of the eighteenth century, as soon as I can. To get there, I am starting to realise, means a dogleg through Versailles and the court of Louis XIV. I’m tracking the Jesuits and this is where they are, this is where ideas and images of China come into focus. And because this is where porcelain is talked of, I need to listen.

  I have taken to writing on my white studio wall. There are swooping arrows for the journey that I’ve taken so far, and dotted lines for what is to come, the months of my journeys crossed off, lists of books to reread and books to buy. My map of white porcelain is becoming less legible. Sometimes I think it is like a blackboard in some MIT lab, clever and suggestive. Today, in high spirits, it looks like a weather system coming in, unsettled ahead.

  In the studio I look round and I’m not sure if anyone has noticed I’ve gone and returned. The studio hums. A maquette of the gallery in New York where I’m exhibiting in eighteen months has been delivered. The gallery is huge and so is the model. It reveals in intimidating detail just how much there is to do. There are the new glaze tests out of the kiln arrayed on a long table. I’m hoping to extend my range of whites, but these are pallid hues, not full whites, and nowhere near what I need.

  I have the latest news from China. I have porcelain and I have photographs and interviews.

  Big deal. The bookshop in Shanghai airport had twelve shelves of new books on China, five of which were about how to do business there and a couple on understanding the Chinese Character. There is a television documentary on labour conditions in electronics factories in Shenzhen tonight. The auction houses say that Chinese art is the next thing, billionaires buying back their patrimony for their private museums. Ai Weiwei is exhibiting at the Venice Biennale and is under house arrest in Beijing.

  Everyone who comes back has news from China.

  ii

  China illustrata. Sapientia Sinica. Nouvelle relation de la Chine. Carte nouvelle de la Grande Tartarie. Un jésuite à Pékin: Nouveaux mémoires sur l’état présent de la Chine. Etat présent de la Chine. China Illustrated. The Meaning of Chinese Wisdom. A New Report from China. A New Map of Tartary. A Jesuit in Peking: New Memoirs on the Present State of China. The Present State of China.

  And from the mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Novissima Sinica. The very latest news from China.

  It is 1690 and in Paris and twelve miles to the west in Versailles, everyone has news from China. Some of it is partial. Some conjectural. Some is even true. Not only does everyone want a bit of China, everyone wants control over a bit of China. And to understand porcelain you need to piece together the fragments of story and news that mention where and how and why it is made.

  You write a letter home from the missions. But who reads it? It is news for whom, exactly? Who opens the Jesuits’ letters? How are they received in Paris?

  They are received with avarice. They are exhausted, wrung out. They are rewritten. At each point on the journey documents are examined for knowledge that would be of use to the community itself – the letters’ primary function was to act as a way for the Jesuits, dispersed across the world from Mexico to Macau, to overhear concerns. There is ‘special care’ taken of letters from the f
oundation of the Order in the 1540s ‘that in every place they should know about the things that are being done in other places, which knowledge is a source of mutual consolation and edification in our Lord’.

  This, though, is only the start. Then these letters would be edited for publication for the world and tidied up, sometimes ascribed to a particular father, sometimes the names of the fathers become by various hands. This is the Jesuits’ intellectual force: their capacity to reach further into China than anyone else can, their resolve in using their missionaries, their skill in calibrating what these men study, how they write home.

  In Paris a young king keeps track of this young emperor in China. The new Académie Royale des Sciences, established early in his reign in 1666, listed questions for a Jesuit expedition to China:

  Whether the reverend Jesuit fathers have made any observations of longitudes and latitudes of China … About the sciences of the Chinese, and about the perfection and defects of their mathematics, astrology, philosophy, music, medicine, and pulse-taking … About tea, rhubarb, and their other drugs and curious plants and whether China produces some kind of spices. Whether the Chinese use tobacco.

  Someone is asking questions and these letters home are responses.

  From early in Louis XIV’s reign there has been constant traffic of news and conjecture, a back swell of flattering comparisons. Leibniz, busy around the courts of Europe, makes direct parallels between Le Roi Soleil and the emperor, the Sun King and the Son of Heaven. Around the king and his advisers there is an overlapping babble of voices, rumours of discoveries, theories as to the meaning of Chinese rites, architecture, moral codes. The books tumble out. What you can tell the king about China and how you can massage it gives you an edge.

  Father Joachim Bouvet, two years journeying back to France from the Chinese missions, eagerly jumps overboard into the surf and struggles to the shore with his packet of letters from Beijing, leaving silks, porcelains, tea on board. He knows what is most important. ‘If these two great monarchs knew each other’, writes Bouvet in October 1691:

  the mutual esteem they would have for each other’s royal virtues could not but prompt them to tie a close friendship and demonstrate it to each other, if only by an intercourse in matters of science and literature, by a kind of exchange between the two crowns of everything that has been invented until now in the way of arts and sciences in the two most flourishing empires of the Universe.

  He works up his Portrait historique de l’empereur de la Chine with a dedication and presents it to the king.

  This is the point. If Louis XIV understands the character of the Kangxi emperor, France will be blessed by having direct knowledge of the secrets of China, the Arcanum of the East. These secrets are intellectual and they are mercantile and they are very practical and they include the glorious secret of how to make porcelain.

  And if the Kangxi emperor understands and respects the king of France, then China will see the light of Christ.

  And all this activity around China, says Leibniz with beautiful concision, writing to yet another French Jesuit, is ‘un commerce de lumière’; enlightenment stretching both ways. This is a tremendous idea and a beautiful image, one of an equality of concerns, a correspondence of civilisations, of light.

  As Leibniz writes to his friend Sophie, the wife of the elector of Hanover:

  I will thus have a sign placed at my door with these words: bureau of address for China, because everyone knows that one only has to address me in order to learn some news. And if you wish to know about the great philosopher Confucius … or the drink of immortality which is the philosopher’s stone of that country, or some things which are a little more certain, you only have to order it.

  He is one of the gatekeepers. If you want to know about Chinese mathematics, the I Ching as a coding of chance events, Chinese characters and their relationship to hieroglyphs, you go to him. Leibniz has been to visit Father Francesco Grimaldi in Rome, just back from the emperor Kangxi’s court, and written up copious notes on fireworks, glass and metal. I realise to my surprise that my hero, the father of rationalism, is anxious to keep ahead in this new, congested field of China Studies.

  iii

  How do you convert the emperor of China? By surrounding him with the evidence of rationality. Or by making yourself indispensable.

  For the century from the first Jesuit landing in China to Louis XIV taking his throne, the Jesuit fathers bring tribute from European courts to the Chinese courts: presents of clocks that chime with Chinese melodies, pictures that reveal gardens stretching into the distance through glorious, unknown perspective, prisms to send rainbows across a room. These are held in special regard: ‘a Tube made like a Prism having eight Sides, which, being placed parallel with the Horizon, presented eight different Scenes, and so lively that they might be mistaken for the Objects themselves: this being joined to the variety of Painting entertained the Emperor for a long time’.

  So they get kaleidoscopes too. But however delightful these objets are, you can be sure that the Son of Heaven has palace stores stacked with other diversions.

  So visitors to the court bring the theatre of knowledge. Sextants, astrolabes and armillaries, telescopes; instruments that have to be demonstrated. They present the spectacle of geometry and astronomy to people who are steeped in these arts and want to know more, ask searching questions. By the time that the fathers come to China, there has been a board of astronomy for 1,600 years and an astronomical observatory for 300 years. The concept of space in which heavenly bodies float has been established, and star maps and globes created centuries before those in Europe. The work of the great Arabic astronomers has been studied and absorbed. During the last few generations there has been a falling off in this knowledge.

  It is accuracy that is offered. The Jesuits’ instruments allowed for their unerring calculation of both lunar and solar eclipses. There could be no more visible manifestation of their abilities than to predict and watch a shadow steal across the sun or moon.

  ‘Thus the Holy Religion’, writes the astronomer and Jesuit Father Ferdinand Verbiest, who has won the ear of the Kangxi emperor, ‘makes her official entry as a very beautiful queen, leaning on the arm of Astronomy, and she easily attracts the looks of all the heathens. What is more, often dressed in a starry robe, she easily obtains access to the rulers and prefects of the provinces, and is received with exceptional kindness.’

  The young, scholarly Kangxi emperor is passionate about how things are made. The emperor asks this father, while he has time, to design a cannon and he agrees. And this new instrument is soon put to use and they work well.

  There is self-interest in most things, but this makes me wince.

  And I think of Père d’Entrecolles, sending him some wine with even greater pleasure.

  iv

  So to the news.

  Kangxi is studying with zeal.

  That prince, seeing all his empire in a profound peace, resolved, in order either to amuse or to occupy himself, to learn the sciences of Europe. He himself chose Arithmetic, Euclid’s Elements, practical Geometry, and Philosophy. F. Antoine Thomas, F. Gerbillon and F. Bouvet had orders to compose treatises on these matters … They composed their proofs in Tartar … The fathers presented these proofs and explained them to the emperor, who, understanding easily all that was taught to him, admired the solidity of our sciences more and more, and applied himself to them more and more.

  Lessons in mathematics are held daily.

  Tutoring takes place in the Great Interior, the Hall of the Nourishment of the Mind, located in the western part of the Forbidden City. This is close to the Imperial Workshops, ‘the location of His Majesty’s Academy of Arts’. Bouvet says that the emperor wanted to have more Jesuits working for him ‘in order to form in his palace, with those who are already there, a kind of academy subordinate to your Royal Academy’.

  Père Jean-François Gerbillon: ‘We were shown into one of the Emperor’s suites, named Yang sin tie
n, in which some of the most skilled craftsmen, painters, turners, goldsmiths, coppersmiths etc. work.’ These ateliers produce maps, bronzes, jade, gold and wooden objects, cloisonné enamels and armaments.

  The emperor wishes to improve glass manufacture in China. Are there any fathers who understand glass? Can we find someone quickly for Him?

  The emperor takes lessons on the harpsichord. A visitor hears him playing a ‘Western iron-wire zither with one hundred and twenty strings, made in the palace workshops’.

  The Son of Heaven, ‘having much suffered from his upheavals in his family and palace, fell ill and as Chinese medicine didn’t manage to heal him, he had recourse to Brother Rodes who succeeded at the beginning to make his palpitations stop and then to heal him, thanks to the wine of the Canaries’.

  Following his return to health, on 20 March 1692 there is to be an Edict of Toleration, allowing Christians to worship freely.

  The French king is to send the Chinese emperor what he desires.

  Chapter sixteen

  the porcelain pavilion

  i

  Versailles is desire realised. It is also crowded and jostled with need that can find no satisfaction.

  As in the court of the emperor Kangxi in Beijing, there is a press of people hoping for preferment. Everyone comes to Versailles. There are nobles, and ambassadors, cardinals and legates and monks, and courtesans and itinerant philosophers. How do you get the ear of a king who has decided to rule without a council? Through his Jesuit confessor? Or through his current maîtresse-en-titre, a hunting companion, his architect? Each of these people has access of sorts, but how do you persuade a man to do anything for you, give you a position, when he has no needs? You wait as he passes on the way to the chapel in the morning and cough and hope to catch his eye.

  Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis’ formidable minister of finance, is said to be the only man who can talk to him straight about how the money works, how to pay for palaces or cannons. Everyone else works by a delicate gavotte of suggestion.