The White Road by Edmund de Waal

Author:Edmund de Waal
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374709099
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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.

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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.

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