The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  If this test is what it appears to be, this is possibly a new kind of material, a red Barcelin, porcelain. And if this mixture works with red clay there is the surmise that it could also work with white.

  Tschirnhaus and Böttger call this new material, with some tenderness, jasper-porcelain, Jaspis-porzellan, ‘since it surely merited the name of a precious stone, one manufactured through art’.

  It is not gold and it is not white gold but after years of grey and ashen vessels that need explication it is something extraordinary to show the king. He loves it.

  v

  And I love this jasper-porcelain, too. It is known and written about, but it should be loved. It has a strange quality of newness to it, even after 300 years.

  This fine-grained clay is used for objects, bowls and jars of unimpeachable austerity, as clean as any Bauhaus vessel. It is perfect both for engraving and for casting, perfect for medals. And what doesn’t need commemoration in this busy kingdom? A return from war, a victory, some marriage.

  These vessels leave the castle at Meissen for the workshops of the lapidarists, jewellers, decorators and gilders to be turned into objects that are perfect and rare, rich and strange. This red coffee pot has tendrils of painted foliage with a garnet gleaming in the centre of each flower. Vases and hexagonal tea caddies take oriental-style shapes and clothe them in a thick black glaze as slow as treacle. Some of these black wares are decorated to look like lacquer, each plane of a teapot carefully delineated with gold lines like braiding, the spout ending in a gilded griffon’s beak. Some are copied from Japanese models, plum blossom, girls with parasols, a scholar at his desk become a little more Saxon, a little heavier.

  And they are wrong, in the way that footballers’ tattoos misquote a bit of Sanskrit, or a line of the Talmud entwined in roses on a bicep gets it wrong. But I’m serious is the message.

  These red porcelains are the best new thing for only a handful of years. And then they get shelved, put higher and higher up in the Meissen warehouse. They are counted every year for stocktaking, each year a little dustier. Ten years after they open their kiln there are still 2,000 pieces left in Meissen, 1,000 in Dresden, thirty-six in Leipzig, all waiting for some margrave up from the country who has missed the fashion and wants to buy these beautiful, red-black-brown, new and gorgeous wares.

  vi

  There is a porcelain plaque celebrating the achievements of Böttger on the ramparts overlooking the Elbe, put up sometime in the 1950s. Early one morning I go off to see him, talk it through man to man. The memorial is stranded amongst some municipal planting. It is an arctic day, the wind whipping off the river, so I nod to him and keep going. A ginkgo has shed its leaves so gold drifts round the foot of the monument.

  I find a café as near to it as I can and sit with my notebook, order coffee.

  My coffee consumption is rising again. My kids monitor me. If I am snappy around clearing the table after supper, they ask me how much I’ve had. I’m now on lots. They ask for details. And I realise that I don’t count pots of cafetière coffee carried up to my desk in the studio, only espresso. When I started my journey I didn’t think that the flat white existed. I think of them as chasers.

  By this point, feeling assailed by archivists and my need to check lists of inventory numbers of when porcelain entered the collections of Augustus the Strong, I realise that I am just coffee. My sentences are shorter by the day.

  You want the details of who worked in Meissen, an experiment in the Goldhaus? The records are here in Dresden: lists and inventories, letter books, accounts, memoranda and edicts, the scraps on torn bits of paper next to the perfectly scripted. There are ‘secret files’ on Böttger archived here, but does that mean there are secret secret files that I am not allowed to see in these archives?

  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.

  I assume this is how the court at Dresden works, the dispersed anxiety of Count Y briefing against Baron X who has the ear of Prince Z. But then I slowly realise that all this note taking is because the Arcanum is mythic, part of history, a kind of proximity to Events that no one could have anticipated. Were you there when the lame walked, the fig tree died, when mercury turned to gold, porcelain was created?

  I order an Americano to follow my espresso macchiato and look at these beautiful black-brown hues of coffee with affection, raise my cup in the direction of Meissen and their dense and dark jasper-porcelain. My hand shakes, just a little.

  Chapter twenty-six

  promises, promises

  i

  For Tschirnhaus and Böttger there is such excitement at the idea of something working, that the king is drawn in and even the gold making is put to one side. And the laboratories in Dresden are extended, to speed up experiments. The summer goes in heady trialling of red clays. And there may be a clear horizon and focus and optimism – and even a promise of autumn – but on 4 September 1706 Böttger has absolutely no rights, no say.

  Tomorrow the vaults are to be cleared and sealed. His papers are to be taken away. He is a chattel, to be removed at a day’s notice, to be bundled up under guard and hurried out and down and into a carriage to Königstein Castle, because the Swedish armies are approaching and he is valuable property. All the precious treasures from the Kunstkammer at the castle in Dresden are arriving in the morning, to be guarded in this fortress, a slab of sandstone 250 metres above the river.

  A child might imagine life as an ascent, a graph line leading to the left and up, shedding as you go, but for Böttger it is actually a return to the same point again and again and again. Here he is again, back in a cell in a castle, five years after his first imprisonment.

  ii

  The salient fact I find out about Königstein is that it was used for the detention and re-education of delinquent youth, Jugendwerkhof, in the GDR. That it has been a prison. To try and draw Königstein you take a wide black marker and move left to right. Done. No need for windows.

  I open the file on the new prisoner. Carefully remove the first sheet. There are three reports from the first day, 6 September:

  A gentleman with three servants. Cause of detention: unknown. Monthly bill of eighty-three thalers, twenty groschen to be paid by HH Augustus.

  Königstein Castle Commander Ziegler: Who is this prisoner? The prisoner cries.

  Böttger: I have no books. My room is too small and no one knows who I am.

  And on it goes, day after day of reports and letters. Everything that Böttger thinks, or needs, how many people he meets and how far he walks in his cell – ten metres and then turns and walks ten metres back. What is your advice? Can you remove him please? And what he is singing, his letters to Tschirnhaus – who promises to teach him geometry and lend him books – then what he reads, then his promises to make gold, his promises to make porcelain, his promise to make it all okay.

  And then the fact that he has made friends with another prisoner in the neighbouring cell, Romanus, the disgraced mayor of Leipzig, the Betrüger, fraudster, maker of promises. And that the prisoner has been spending a suspicious amount of time in the lavatory. We investigated and found a bundle of notes secreted behind a panel, plans for escape. We have increased the guard.

  On 3 June 1707, Böttger writes to Augustus saying, ‘I need to see you. Things of great importance. It is my great hope that with the help of Herr von Tschirnhaus, I can within two months present something great. Please come to Königstein for at least two hours.’

  Five days later, Böttger is taken from his cell and brought to Dresden where he meets with Tschirnhaus and Augustus. It is only five in the
morning. He promises to make translucent porcelain. And he requests red and white clay, bolus, fine sand, chalk, alabaster, brick clay, wood for burning.

  He is taken back to Königstein. And three months later, Böttger accompanied by Tschirnhaus is brought to a new laboratory in the vaults of the Jungfernbastei underneath the city walls in Dresden.

  I close the file. I have got him back to Dresden.

  And all I can think about is the collateral damage of Böttger’s fantasies of escape, slipping past the guards unrecognised, passing borders, making new lives in glory, hallowed and famous and special, lit up by gold. I think about promises and all I can see is Romanus.

  Böttger promised to get him out and it is a detail, a small one, but Romanus died in Königstein in 1746. He sees his wife once. He never sees his daughter.

  How many more broken promises can Augustus and Tschirnhaus put up with? How many can I?

  Chapter twenty-seven

  half translucent and milk white, like a narcissus

  i

  The new laboratory in the Jungfernbastei was convenient as it meant that Augustus could keep close to these new experiments and Böttger could be well guarded. But its vaults were low, and it was close to homes, so firing kilns was perilous.

  On 15 January 1708, they open a kiln in their new laboratory. It holds seven trials, using a new white clay from Colditz and an alabaster in different proportions.

  N1 clay only

  N2 clay and alabaster in the ratio of 4:1

  N3 clay and alabaster in the ratio of 5:1

  N4 clay and alabaster in the ratio of 6:1

  N5 clay and alabaster in the ratio of 7:1

  N6 clay and alabaster in the ratio of 8:1

  N7 clay and alabaster in the ratio of 9:1

  In the archives at Meissen I hold this page of notes. Böttger has written them aslant, quickly, in German and dog-Latin, scattering alchemical symbols: ‘after five hours in the kiln … first had white appearance, second and third collapsed, fourth remained in shape but discoloured … last three album et pellucidum’, white and translucent. Five is optimum, the best.

  They hold the tests up to the scant light.

  It is twenty years since Tschirnhaus started his trials for a porcelain body for a pure white clay through which light can pass. It is eight years since a young, scared apothecary’s boy was brought to Dresden. It is five years since they were brought together.

  It is 400 years since porcelain first arrived in Europe from China.

  Page from Böttger’s notebook showing his first porcelain tests, 15 January 1708

  In a smoky, murky vault, slung alongside the billets for soldiers, porcelain has been reinvented. It has come into being.

  ii

  With this mixture they trial again and again until they can make small vessels. The court potter Fischer, whom no one likes, is asked to make pots for them. And Tschirnhaus makes himself a little jar. It comes out ‘half translucent and milk white, like a narcissus’.

  I love this. My mathematician’s milk-white jar.

  And the pace is now frenzied.

  The accounts are cinematic. ‘Every half an hour they looked into the kiln, like cattle, and the glow made everyone jump back, it was so hot that big stones were pulled out of the vaults and the hair on their heads was singed away and the tiles got so hot that big blisters developed on their feet.’ There was real danger that the heat of the kilns could ignite the wooden structures above them on the ramparts.

  Augustus arrives with Prince Fürstenberg to inspect. As they enter they feel ‘the ghastly glow hitting them’. The prince would have preferred to turn around, but Augustus wants to see the kiln in action. It is hellish with noise and heat and Böttger looks like a ‘chimney sweep’. He has damp rags wrapped around his head.

  He opens the spyhole and the king and sceptical courtier see the saggars appearing darkly amongst the flames. The men draw a saggar out, and inside is a white teapot. This glowing pot is taken with metal tongs and thrown into a bucket of cold water. There is a loud bang. Böttger then takes the teapot out of the water and it’s still intact. And according to the records, though ‘the glaze hadn’t completely melted’, it was otherwise ‘completely successful’.

  Something has gone right.

  Security at the vaults is ramped up. Ninety soldiers are detailed. Large pits to store the clay are made. A bigger kiln is commissioned and 1,000 white bricks ordered from the Glasshouse. An order goes out across Saxony to all civil servants that samples of local clay and brick clay are to be sent to the laboratory to be analysed. You suddenly see the reach and power of this king. You see what five generations of investment in the mineral-testing laboratory of the Goldhaus means to the king of Saxony.

  The workshop trials all the new clays coming in. Their recipe for Kalkporzellan, or chalk porcelain, settles on nine parts of Colditz clay, three parts of white Schnorrische clay and three parts of alabaster.

  On 24 April 1708, Augustus signs and seals a decree establishing the first porcelain factory in Dresden, the first porcelain manufactory in the West. Everyone gets titles, promotion and the promise of money.

  I read this decree. It is the sigh of a nugget of gold folded thoughtlessly into a velvet pocket, the wash of royal appropriation over anything you do, or know. It means you cannot really impress the king as he owns you, what you know and what you will know.

  And Tschirnhaus refuses his elevation to the Privy Council, saying that he doesn’t want a title, ‘until this thing is in a state where I am justified to use one’. I feel so proud of him pausing at this moment of exhilaration.

  On 9 October, Tschirnhaus and Böttger fire the first cup of true unglazed porcelain, the first white, translucent vessel.

  And two days later on 11 October 1708, Tschirnhaus dies.

  He is fifty-seven.

  His room is sealed, but his papers cannot be found. It is said that someone has stolen them within hours of his death. His servant flees with gold and samples of the white porcelain and is arrested and questioned, but denies any knowledge of Tschirnhaus’s notebooks.

  Böttger writes briefly, ‘I have lost a very high and worthy friend, His Royal Majesty has lost a very loyal servant … If God will have it, his place will be filled with an equally loyal and able man, but I have my doubts.’

  The same day he announces to the king that the first porcelain in the West has been created, that he has finally cracked the mysteries of the Arcanum, is in possession of the knowledge to create porcelain, has discovered white gold. This new white material is Böttgerporzellan.

  iii

  I now have my second white object in the world. I am very slowly building up my installation, collection.

  The first is my monk’s cap ewer from Jingdezhen, made for the emperor Yongle, sweet-white for a man who needs and desires purification.

  And now I have my white cup from Dresden. It was made for Tschirnhaus. Augustus the Strong may claim whatever he claims, but this is an idea that comes from a compulsion to think something through, not an order to sate a desire.

  It took my mathematician a very long time for it to come into being. I look at it very closely. Watch closely the moment of formation, Tschirnhaus writes in his book, the moment that one thing becomes another, and I take him seriously.

  I see his childhood in a noisy family in the country, his lessons with Spinoza and his conversation with Newton, I see him learning to grind lenses, learning to make great mirrors that focus the rays of sun until he could make one small part of the world melt. I see him in conversation about China, about porcelain, about the interiority of materials with Leibniz. I see him here in Dresden, navigating the court and its echoes and rumours and endless edicts, coaxing a febrile, scared boy into work, continuing to experiment year after year. I see how he brought his method and a boy’s intuitions into charged connection and compounded porcelain.

  Amongst Tschirnhaus’s possessions – alongside his books and ‘curiöse Sachen’, or ‘od
d things’ – was a wooden toy, used in mechanical demonstrations. It was a hand span across, a ‘v’ of two slightly inclined rails and a beautifully turned double ended cone. You place the cone at the base of the ramp and it goes up.

  That is what the world does. It may be explicable, but it remains extraordinary. In my hands there is a white cup. It is modest, but this is my alchemical moment where, for the first time in this journey, I have clarity about how an idea can come into being.

  This is a different white.

  iv

  In that winter of 1708, there were terrible frosts across the whole of Europe. In London, William Derham recorded lows of minus twelve degrees Celsius; ‘I believe the Frost was greater (if not more universal also) than any other within the Memory of Man.’ Trees explode. People freeze in their beds, animals in their byres. The Thames, the Baltic, the lakes at Versailles are ice. It is the Great Frost, Le Grand Hiver. Everything is white.

  Meissen porcelain cup, c. 1715

  The Dresdner Merckwürdigkeiten announced that ‘the cold was so persistent, that you couldn’t heat your living rooms and birds fell to the floor as the air was so cold’. On 10 February 1709, it suddenly got warmer and the melting started, so the Elbe flooded terribly. A fortnight later, new snow fell. At the beginning of March the snow melted again and there was a new flood.