The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China by Huan Hsu

Author:Huan Hsu [Hsu, Huan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307986313
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2015-03-24T04:00:00+00:00

UNTIL I SAW those shards in the Pottery Workshop’s coffee shop, I had seen no indication of such abundance. The Jingdezhen I had experienced appeared paved over and far removed from its ancient past. But the shards ignited a longtime impulse, the same one that compelled me to spend hours sifting through my Legos for the right piece, to steal baseball cards, to interview twice as many people as I needed to for the perfect nugget of information, to scour classified ads for classic tennis racquets. And the shards offered the chance to collect not only old, real Chinese things but also objects that could have come directly from my great-great-grandfather’s time and beyond. The attraction was so powerful that I never questioned my desire.

I asked Takeshi where I could find some for myself. Everywhere, he said. Historically important kiln sites were still being discovered all the time. He had once gone to visit a site outside of the city, where a road was being built atop a huge Song-era kiln. “It was ten meters deep, freshly dug, and some pots looked like they were put there that day,” he said. “Amazing! There were more pots and saggers than soil, and it was all nine hundred years old! This was during the dragon kiln period, so every firing had tons of discarded material.”

Even Jingdezhen’s waterways were plaqued with shards, since anything broken during transit or loading was summarily tossed overboard. Most residents above a certain age could remember when the Chang River ran so clean, they could read the characters on the shards lining its bottom, in such quantities that they had to wear shoes when swimming to protect their feet from getting cut.

But like any beginner, I still couldn’t see what I sought, until one evening before I returned to Shanghai. Just beyond the layer of new development ringing People’s Square, I happened upon a construction site where workers had dug a long trench about eight feet deep through a historic neighborhood. An equally long pile of earth stretched along the trench. The sun had settled at a languid position in the sky, dimming its heat, and residents had emerged from their shady refuges. Dozens of men, women, and children stood in the ditches, chipping away at the walls with hand tools. Others clutched old rice sacks and walked meandering search patterns over the removed soil. I went over to see what they were doing and realized that the soil was studded with blue and white shards, and the walls of the trench were composed of layer upon layer of shard deposits.

Once I saw these first shards in situ, I began seeing them everywhere, as clear as stars in a night sky. They seemed to multiply before me, a carpet of blue and white fragments stretching from my feet to the horizon.

I walked over to the trench and picked up a few blue and white fragments. It was technically illegal to dig for porcelain shards, but the city supposedly looked the other way when it came to combing through the disturbed soil of construction sites.

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