CHINA SYNDROME
Edmund de Waal on the dark side of the world’s centuries-old obsession with porcelain.
A renowned ceramicist and author, Edmund de Waal is best known for his book The Hare With Amber
Eyes, the story of more than 200 Japanese netsuke figurines owned by the Jewish half of his family and passed from generation to generation, even during the war years.
His latest book, The White Road:
Journey Into an Obsession, traces the 1,000-year history of porcelain, from ancient China to the modern day. De Waal’s book is poetic and has a stream-of-consciousness style as he considers the places and people around the world involved in the creation and use of porcelain.
This is not just a history of porcelain; it is a memoir. You began making pots as a child and in your teen years you sensed this was going to be your métier.
I was 5 when I made my first white pot. I am now in my 50s, so that is quite a lot of years making white pots. Early on, when I was 12 or 13, I realized there was something obsessive about making pots. I am not a natural potter. I see people who can sit down and lyrically make things. For me it was hard. It was like learning a musical instrument — there were a lot of hours to put in. There was something powerful about taking a ball of clay and making a vessel. I’ve never lost that feeling.
It was a Jesuit priest who introduced the French to Chinese porcelain in the 17th century. Then it became a craze.
This marvellous Jesuit priest, Père d’Entrecolles, one of my heroes, wrote a great narrative of how you could make porcelain. Before him there was a hugely baroque, bizarre theory of how to make porcelain. Is it made from bones of sea creatures? Is it white gold? He sees it being made and he broke the secrets of how porcelain is created.
As soon as his letter from China to France gets published, the mania for porcelain takes hold with kings and princes and alchemists. Everyone tries to have it made or make it. Louis XIV makes the Trianon and decorates it in porcelain for his mistress.
The Chinese have been making porcelain for centuries in the city of Jingdezhen. There are mountains of porcelain shards around the city; they throw the imperfect ones away. Today they are making Mao pins and other tchotchkes. They are suffering from inhaling the porcelain dust. What a tragic story — art turned to feed a tourism industry, and death.
The dust has always been there. One of the stories in my book is looking at the cost of porcelain to the people who make it. Makers of porcelain pieces have always inhaled this terrible white dust. They have it in their lungs. When I am in Jingdezhen, seeing these children make porcelain, I am conscious of this huge health cost. In Stoke-on-Trent, England, where they also made porcelain, they called it potter’s rot. Part of this book is tracing the unknown history of the people who work with porcelain.
And there has always been kitsch in porcelain. There is a moment in the book where I say I don’t like all porcelain. I pick up my grandmother’s Meissen pot, which is really valuable. Just because it is old doesn’t make it beautiful.
Porcelain making isn’t just about art’ it’s about math and philosophy.
It becomes a philosophical question. How do you make it? People started with mathematics and looking at how light works, and they created lenses so they could burn materials and analyze them properly. Unexpectedly, I found this German mathematician, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, who was studying the making of porcelain. Porcelain involves science and history and that’s why it is so appealing to me. For you, porcelain must be clean white, no painting on it.
Whiteness for me makes it so much more interesting and present. It makes me feel alive. If you have a lump of white porcelain clay, it feels full of possibility. The only other time I feel that is with a white page when I am beginning to write. Tell me about Josiah Wedgwood. You admire him even though he avoided white.
Wedgwood changed ceramics in the West. He is the first ceramics entrepreneur. He was a friend of artists, scientists, politicians, the Royal Family. He was a self-made millionaire and a tastemaker. He is also a complete bastard and totally ruthless. He sends an emissary to Cherokee country in the United States in order to “steal” the porcelain clay from them and bring it back to London. The sadness and the poignancy in that story is extraordinary. Your search leads you to Nazi Germany, and you have a photo of Heinrich Himmler inspecting porcelain at Dachau, the concentration camp. It was the prisoners there who made the porcelain, including figures of a Hitler youth in shorts.
I was totally unprepared for that. I followed a lead and the story unfolded in this appalling way. It is the darkest side of obsession. The Nazis regarded porcelain as the perfect Aryan material, perfect and white. It is a total inversion of the material I adore. The material I love was used to make objects of profound banality at a cost to the people who made them. One of the objects made by the concentration camp victims was a figure of Bambi, made so an SS family can put it on their mantel.
I went to see this guy who sells porcelain to Russians and white supremacists in the United States. There is a market in Nazi porcelain beyond comprehension. White is purity and beauty but it is also effacement and erasure.