The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  And I made an attic.

  Attics are places where you try and forget. They are stuffed with cast-offs, broken toys, places where you store the things you cannot legitimately dump – wedding presents, children’s drawings, abandoned musical instruments, suitcases that might come in useful for some over-specified holiday that isn’t going to happen. And they are places where the most valuable things go.

  But in my porcelain room I wanted a place for the ideas that haven’t been completely realised, working notes, marginalia, drafts crossed out. Why would I want to keep this? Not for authority, but rather for the humanity of it, the crunch of shards in the yard of the workshop.

  So, I put a garniture and some lidded jars and a line of pots that I’d tried out on the shelves before realising their proportions were slightly clumsy, and they looked beautiful in the shadows above me.

  Beautiful because you cannot see them in their entirety, pinned down and accessible. They were safe, I suppose. Not safe from being handled, used, but safe from being got at and documented and sold. It is not that being shadowy gives you gravitas or mystery, or that you are clothed in some borrowed seriousness. Rather, shadows push profiles away. You can gain the shape of an idea by losing its particulars.

  We had an exhibition opening about which I can remember very little except that my little boy of three adored the room next door with its pineapples. And that one person after another after another told me how frustrating it was not to be able to see what was in the attics. Why weren’t they lit?

  This was my transitional moment as a potter. I now made Installation. I hovered excitingly near to Architecture.

  And I heard Grievance.

  iv

  I’m racing again. I know I should be calmer, but calm and this strange city are not aligned for me. I have no time left. I have so much to see again. I need to check the colour of the celadon wares that Augustus commissioned for the Japanisches Palais so I run back across the Augustus Bridge, turn right and run through the courtyard of the Zwinger.

  I catch my breath in the porcelain galleries. They hum gently as visitors admire the exhibits.

  These spaces were never intended for porcelain. They weren’t used for this until the Soviet Union shipped back the treasures of Dresden, taken to Moscow for fraternal safekeeping in the days following the entry of the Red Army in April 1945.

  In 1958, Augustus’ porcelain returned – mostly – alongside the other great objects from the Kunstkammer. The Zwinger, in ruins from the bombing, began to be restored and in 1961, it was reopened.

  I range back and forth. The galleries are magnificently wrong. Garnitures of Kangxi famille rose from China and Kakiemon from Japan sit on giltwood tables. There are fragments of ‘porcelain room’ display in the niches, plates and vases on brackets in perfect symmetry. Some of the Dragoon vases are here on a plinth. There is the model of Augustus the Strong on horseback. This was the subject of endless despair. How can you make a sculpture in porcelain where horses’ legs can support a figure? One huge room of these galleries holds the menagerie of porcelain animals, created over twenty years by the great sculptor Kändler, displayed on a rocky outcrop under a bell tent of swagged silk. The alarm goes off every ten minutes as someone tries to get close to one of the huge porcelain figures of the rhino or the lion.

  There are vitrines for some of the famous dinner services – the Swan service made for Count Brühl, where the pellucid plates are modelled so that fish and birds seem to emerge out of water. There are coronation services and marriage services, and the whole unfolding of Meissen as Everything. Porcelain for harlequins and bands of musicians, fountains and ruins for table decorations, candelabra, crucifixions, busts, cutlery, walking sticks. Porcelain for tribute and gift and diplomacy, for display and for intimacy. And painted with classical scenes, and landscapes, and phantasmagorical creatures and butterflies, birds, insects. The celadon wares flare up on a wall. They are bluer than I remembered them.

  There are helpful cases for comparison, and the wall texts are terrific, and clear. Lifetimes of scholarship and connoisseurship are here. And it is not that I’m expecting authenticity – great dinner services on tables a hundred feet long, the menagerie lit by candles, though that would have been a nice touch – it is just that it seems so tame.

  It has been admired so much that it has expired, grandly. The fierce, brilliant, terrifying idea of white has been smothered. Tschirnhaus has disappeared, gilded.

  Porcelain has become bourgeois. It becomes my eight-lobed bowl, fat with summer fruit. It becomes the ‘gilt-edged Meissen plates’ brought in carefully by the servants under the sharp eye of the mistress of the house during an endless dinner of fish and boiled ham with onion sauce and desserts of macaroons, raspberries and custard in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. It becomes expensive and collectable. It is here that porcelain becomes possible for many things; it is re-inscribed as a commodity rather than a princely secret. This particular rewriting should feel fine. After all, each piece of porcelain in the collections has its cipher, a reign mark from China, or a factory symbol and its inventory number, and many renumberings. Every document seems to be annotated. When I go back to the great first notebook entry of porcelain being discovered, album et pellucidum, I realise, painfully late in all my research, that it is not only Böttger’s handwriting on the page but that someone else has written up the notes too.

  This whole city is a palimpsest. There are contemporary restorations of GDR rebuildings of the palaces and treasure houses destroyed in the war.

  As I leave the Zwinger through the archway under the Stadt Pavillion I notice a plaque on the left commemorating its rebuilding with the help of the Soviet Union. It is undated. But there is a footnote, a smaller plaque, also undated, which tells you that the original is from 1963.

  This, I think, must be early Post-Wall Confidence, 1990.

  In the taxi to the airport I chat to the driver about the Lebkuchen and Stollen that I bought last night at the Christmas market, and she tells me that the market was not good. The proper one is elsewhere. I always seem to get markets wrong.

  Chapter thirty

  1719

  i

  So I finish Saxony and write Good Work.

  France: Shows Promise. In France, the porcelain factory at Saint-Cloud continues to make contre-façon wares. They are still beautiful, still wrong. The grand dauphin with all his beautiful Chinese porcelains in the rooms at Versailles has died. The Fonthill vase, recorded in a drawing by the aristocratic antiquarian M. de Gaignières, has disappeared. There is a new king, Louis XV, nine years old.

  Delft is simple. Nothing much has happened in the twenty years since Tschirnhaus visited. There is still no proper porcelain. Must Try Harder.

  ii

  And then I get to China 1719.

  In China, Père d’Entrecolles looks after his parishioners. And his fellow Jesuits too, who are a quarrelsome lot. Rome isn’t helping. The archives stress how loved he is. He is still in Jiangxi Province, still travelling to Jingdezhen.

  His first great letter from Jingdezhen has been printed in the Jesuit Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, edited by Father Du Halde, and is attracting attention.

  His great friend, the Mandarin Lang Tingji, the maker of porcelains for the emperor, is now very grand indeed. He is not only the governor, but he is responsible for the 1,100 mile long Grand Canal that links Beijing to Hangzhou.

  The French have done the Kangxi emperor proud. He loves the way that the enamels work on porcelain, he loves his harpsichord, his mathematics. They sent him a good Jesuit glass expert, a Bavarian, and there are now Imperial Glassworks. These are a great success. The emperor has sent this new glass to Peter the Great in Moscow, and forty-two pieces to the pope.

  But it is enamels which have been the greatest success with the Kangxi emperor.

  At this moment, Father Matteo Ripa writes that:

  His Majesty having become fascinated by our European enamel and by the new method o
f enamel painting, tried by every possible means to introduce the latter to his Imperial Workshops, which he had set up for this purpose within the palace, with the result that with the colours used there to paint porcelain and with several large pieces of enamel which he had brought from Europe, it became possible to do something. In order also to have the European painters, he ordered me and Castiglione to paint in enamels.

  Unwilling to be enamel painters, they have painted so badly that the emperor has excused them.

  Others have learnt with dispatch. And these porcelains, with their soft pink and carmine colours, famille rose, are remarkable. This new palette brings new stories. The first examples to reach the West have been met with astonishment.

  I read a description of the emperor. He is Kang-hi, that is, the Peaceable.

  then in the forty-third Year of his Age: His Stature was proportionable; his Countenance comely; his Eyes sparkling, and larger than generally his Countrymen have them; his Nose somewhat hawked, and a little round at the End: He had some Marks of the Small-Pox, which yet did not lessen the Beauty of his Countenance.

  I look hard at his portrait. All emperors look like Dorothy L. Sayers, legs planted firmly apart, hands on lap, solid, unknowable.

  iii

  And then I reach England 1719.

  A German prince, George of Hanover, has been king of Great Britain for five years. He is possibly the only German prince uninterested in porcelain. He brings his servants, wisely imports his cook and a few bits of Meissen. There are no porcelain factories in England.

  And a young boy is starting out on the long walk from Devon to London. It is 207 miles, a week’s solid trudge, from Kingsbridge church to No. 2 Plough Court Pharmacy, off Lombard Street. William Cookworthy is to be a working lodger. He cannot pay the fees for something so formal as an apprenticeship. He is a charity case, who is to have six years of training in chemistry.

  Part three

  Plymouth

  Chapter thirty-one

  The Birth of English Porcelain

  i

  To find my third white cup, I’m home in England.

  A London winter. Nothing much to complain about, except that the studio leaks. There is now so little room that we have to carry pots and vitrines outside to crate them up.

  Part of the problem is that the tiles have come back from Jingdezhen in a dozen crates of ridiculous heft. I need seventeen intact tiles, I’ve worked out, for my exhibition in Cambridge. Nothing has broken in transit, though I step backwards off the tail lift of the lorry and feel bruised and stupid. I have 121 beautiful, thin, celadon-glazed miraculous porcelain boards, some slightly rippled, a few with a gentle tilt. I find a very small chip in one corner. This is, I reflect, why there is so much Chinese porcelain in Europe. Everyone orders far too much from anxiety.

  I’ve seen a factory for sale. It is vast, eight times the size of our studio here with a double-height hangar and a floor of offices, each partitioned into tiny rooms. No Obstructions On Stairs. A hatch for Enquiries. One man works up here and one down in the factory.

  They made cartridges and repaired shotguns and rifles. There is a room lined with zinc panels for gunpowder and there are seventy years of wooden boxes from Germany with Explosive written on them, stacked up, filing racks of bird scarers and duck lures. There is a safe they can’t move. No one, says the man, has guns repaired anymore. The firm has been going since the middle of the nineteenth century. He is matter-of-fact but it is sad.

  It is very melancholy. It is very cold. I love it.

  You could do a project here, say architect friends, record it all properly, keep some part of it. They are completely right. I should. There is work to be done – an exhibition for New York – and time is getting short, so it all gets stripped back and the offices and the dully glinting room of zinc put in skips and my new studio is painted start-again white. Fierce White.

  ii

  England and porcelain.

  This should be the easy bit. After all that aristocratic stuff, I’m here in market towns. I know the landscape. If Dresden was Technicolor with mistresses and escapes, England promises lots of experiments going wrong. There is a different speed here, and I have to think my way into how to pace thirty years of doggedness.

  I’m also a little anxious about writing about desire for porcelain. It is universal, of course, but the English keep their desires very well muffled up and it may prove trickier to locate.

  England 1719. A young boy is starting out on the long walk from Devon to London. In terms of storytelling I wonder about how many times I can write about setting out.

  In terms of white porcelain, setting out again makes complete sense.

  iii

  It is a story like any good eighteenth-century novel. The frontispiece for The Life and Times of Wm Cookworthy would show the hero – fifteen years old, Quaker, solid and earnest with his pack on his back walking towards London. The first chapter would skim the death of his father, the industrious home ruined, the seven young children, the further catastrophic penury when the South Sea Bubble takes all savings and ends with a letter of invitation, an offer of work in an apothecary’s workshop.

  And then the long walk from known towards an unknown future.

  The known is deep England, a village folded into small valleys and oak woods. There are creeks that fill from the estuary and flood. It is a slow bit of country as the roads are narrow and claggy in winter, damp most of the year, dusty for a surprising month or two, then impassable again. The colour is mud and lichen, strong unambiguous colours.

  The unknown starts as you walk up the three wide shallow steps flanked by a curved handrail to the double front doors of a pharmacy. Open the doors and you come into a generous hall leading to the room with a large window letting light and air into the shop where Silvanus Bevan and his assistants compound their medicines, lotions, ointments, draughts and tinctures at a long counter.

  I realise that it is just like the pharmacy in the Molksmarkt in Berlin where Böttger started out.

  Chapter thirty-two

  Three Scruples make a Dram

  In the pharmacy are blue and silvered jars on shelves arrayed against the back wall and the impression is of efficiency, of organisation. This is a modern druggists with a young owner – Silvanus Bevan is twenty-eight and newly qualified – and the Pharmacopoeia Londinesis or the New London Dispensatory, with its authoritative tabulations of remedies, is there for the studying and annotating.

  There is work for a boy in learning how to grind down and remake the composite parts of a world into warily dried pills to cheer ‘the Heart and Vital Spirits’. You go to bed and your mind ticks. Three Grains make a Scruple / Three Scruples make a Dram / Eight Drams make an Ounce. And then it is five and you rise from your pallet bed in the attic – too cold or too hot – and wash in the cellar where the pipe comes in.

  The household gathers for silence as this is a Quaker house. And then your day starts and your hands and arms are in cold water all day. You must wash the flagstone floor and you must wash the pestles and mortars, the copper basins, the spoons and scoops, the measuring pans, the bottles and stoppered jars, the phials. You feed the stove which is drying agrimony and centaury. You run out up the stairs and out into the yard to help the men unloading straw-wrapped boxes, barrels that are rolled down into the cellar.

  What do you know about what is precious in this place, where a pinch of this saffron-coloured powder could buy the hillside behind your village? You start to learn who is who amongst this flow of people coming and going through the gateway into Plough Court and up the three steps into No. 2; the doctors, pedlars, tradesmen, travellers, the desperate and the ill, the importunate, the pious and the curious, the poor, the Venetian ambassador, charlatans, Newton, fellows of the Royal Society, Sarah the duchess of Marlborough, Quaker Elders.

  You are sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and on the threshold.

  And it is not just people crossing this threshold. From Pennsylvania
come specimens of American plants such as ginseng and copper ore, bezoars from Persian mountain goats, powdered pearls from Antwerp. These materials are a kind of cosmography, a mapping of the world.

  Watercolour of No. 2 Plough Court, London, c. 1860

  And objects come in for Silvanus Bevan’s collection too. He has the forelimb of a mermaid and fossils and he nurtures herbs and rare plants, and may have forsworn some of the esoteric ingredients favoured by apothecaries of the previous generations, like powdered swallow and human tears.

  Knowledge here is an ebb and flow.

  There are books arriving all the time, in Greek, French and Latin. Bevan goes with his assistants to lectures, assemblies, experiments, Meeting. This household has not been blessed with children, but it has as much noise as Quakers can handle. ‘Let him have a care he mistake not one thing for another’ is the rubric of the great Pharmacopoeia. Gradually you learn ‘the election of simples’, the identification of plants, seeds, berries and leaves, how milkwort differs from soapwort and all the varieties of English plants from adder’s tongue to yarrow. How it looks, how it smells, the ghost of its aroma as it crumbles into dust in the shallow dish where you prepare plants for decoctions. You learn preparations.

  You learn how to think.

  Thinking is through the hands as well as the head. After a couple of years you can tip a phial of X or Y and tell by the speed it moves whether it has the correct viscosity. When you levigate, ‘make into a smooth, fine powder or paste, as by grinding when moist: a method of separating fine from coarse particles’, you change the direction of the pestle in the heavy mortar. This is apprenticeship: the moving of learning from head to hand to head. No short cuts repeats the clock.

  No short cuts, said Geoffrey during my apprenticeship thirty-five years ago, no mistaking one thing for another.