The complexity of its construction was endlessly fascinating to visitors. ‘It is an octagonal building of nine stories … bright with many-coloured porcelain, which throws off a glittering light like the reflected rays from gems; it is in perfect preservation,’ writes British army officer Granville Gower Loch, visiting in 1843. ‘The porcelain is fastened to the tower with mortar, as Dutch tiles are upon a stove, except the projecting cornices and bas-reliefs of grotesque monsters, which are nailed.’
Being a British officer he gives a good account of his ascent and casts a seasoned expeditionary eye over the surrounding territory:
The ample view from the summit surpassed our expectations. Facing the south, a little river from the distant hills came winding like the Forth near Stirling: it passes by the south and western walls, and helps to supply the canal with water. Towards the S.W., as far as the sight could reach, flowed the princely Yang-tze-kiang, leaving between us and it, as it passed Nanking, a richly cultivated flat of paddy land about three miles in breadth. Facing the north, we look down upon the walls and roofs of a dense cluster of houses – the Chinese city.
And, being British, on the summit of the Bao-ensi – the delicate, codified, personal memorial to an emperor’s parents – they know what is appropriate. ‘On the top of the highest pagoda in China we drank the health of our Queen in champagne.’
Engraving of the porcelain pagoda, Nanjing, in Johan Nieuhof, 1665
Shortly after these officers had celebrated their ascent the porcelain pagoda was destroyed in 1856 during the Taiping Rebellion, its Buddhist imagery shattered. Very little remains. Visitors picked up bits, bought carvings from locals for souvenirs. Three white porcelain bricks sit in the stores of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The label reads: ‘Gift of E. J. Smithers, 1889.’
vi
Yongle’s white pots have very small bubbles, so minuscule that they create a refraction and scattering of the light. They have the softness of surface of a winter apple.
The white porcelains of this period have been known since the late sixteenth century as zong yan tian bi, or ‘bristle hole sweet white’ wares. White sugar had only just become known in China.
So I get white as sugar as a simile too.
But it is a minatory white. I look at my first white pot, the emperor’s monk’s cap ewer. And I can’t help thinking about Yongle’s order to execute 2,800 women in his household, concubines and servants, after rumours of a plot. He moves mountains, creates cities and orders knowledge and he builds white pagodas of porcelain.
vii
I read that the porcelain pagoda is going to be rebuilt. Wang Jianlin, the richest man in China according to Forbes, has given 1 billion RMB to reconstruct it as part of a luxury hotel, apartment and mall complex by the Yangtze. On the comments page LoveChinaLongTime posts ‘Real Estate developers are good! They work hand in hand with the China Communist Party for a harmonious China of the 21st century!!’ In this new development the white bricks are no longer part of the scheme. There is going to be more colour, more pattern. And there is going to be gold. Of course there is.
I think I might be in the right city for porcelain but the wrong city for white. I should spend my last day on a visit to the new factory where they make the porcelain mugs for Starbucks and Hello Kitty ware for Japan and Peter Rabbits for the world.
It’s the end of school and in the lanes in front of the teashop is a surge of kids in their uniforms. The screens of their phones glow. I order more tea. Write a bit more. Time to get going again into this damp city full of colour.
Monk’s cap ewer, Yongle Dynasty, 1403–25
Chapter eleven
I read everything. I understand. Continue.
i
I’m running out of days.
I’m not quite sure why but I’ve been brought out of town to a kiln site. I didn’t ask to see another one. In fact, I tried to ask not to see another, but there was a lot of smiling and now I’m in a scrubby field a couple of hours from the city near a mound with a board with a picture of a kiln on it.
This site is by a river. I see a kingfisher, which is lovely, but I want to be elsewhere.
On the way back we stop at a museum. It is like every local museum in the world. I’m sure that this one had a diligent founder who bought this cradle, the churns, the bamboo yokes, the three different scythes, the local fisherman’s coat that differs from the next valley and the next, framed the photographs, put the coal in the hearth in the kitchen.
The museum is in the house of a family that held power here until the twentieth century happened to them. It is 500 years old, built in the late Ming Dynasty as a courtyard with fretted balconies running round it and a stage at one end for music and dance. High up by the eaves are painted tiles of magpies and the wood has reached that shade of ash-grey that I find particularly beautiful and all in all it has a perfect melancholy to it. My guide is explaining to me, slowly, the cases of pots from Han to Qing when I catch sight of the final case.
It is of revolutionary ceramics. But not the safe ones that I had seen before, the Maos and the pretty factory girls wheeling their bicycles to work. These are porcelain models, eight inches high, with clear, clean glazes.
Three women in blue overalls crowd a kneeling girl wearing a dunce’s hat. She is bending her head forward, supplicatory. Another shows a boy standing on a chair pointing his arm, stretching his body in denunciation. The third model is of an execution with the head of a man rolling towards us.
You see terror. It is in bright light as if from a comic book. You see the details; they don’t go away.
You count: three women to a single girl, the age of the boy – eight or nine – the bound hands behind the back of the man to be killed, four twists of a rope. You feel the exultation of power in this porcelain, the taste of control over other people, grown-ups.
They have been made quickly. The modelling isn’t perfect – areas have been rushed or missed. But someone has spent real time on the painting, damn it, getting that head right. I ask who made them, meaning who could make them and when, but my questions disappear in the business of photographs, the itinerary, an emphatic motion towards the waiting car.
The questions burn. How do you get to this place, the place where you make a porcelain model of an execution?
I start, but my guide wants to talk about kingfishers. Do I know the beautiful Chinese character for kingfisher? She sketches it in her hand. Kingfisher feathers were part of tribute to the emperor, she says. A glaze was named after them.
How would you catch kingfishers?
ii
I get to the archive at the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute very late. It’s the old building in the centre of town, and is supposed to have been built by the East Germans in the 1960s, during one of the brief rapprochements between Mao and Erich Honecker.
There is rubbish, real rubbish – a broken TV, two split bags of cement, a spew of Coke cans – in the stairwell. The archive is on the top floor, a long room without air conditioning, so the windows are open to the wall of humidity outside and we all have bottles of water as the first volume of the fifty volumes of imperial correspondence concerning porcelain of the Qing Dynasty is laid in front of me.
It is a volume from the forty-fifth year of the emperor Qianlong. I ask the archivist if we can open it at random. We do.
It is an order to Tang Yin, the superintendent of the Office of Imperial Porcelain at Jingdezhen porcelains for the Outer Office of the Hall for Making Something. No one can agree. They want a pair of double-happiness incense burners in imitation of the ware from the Lo kiln in Hubei. And one ditto but in Ding ware. And a single dish in Ju ware for placing washed fruit in. And a single Ru-ware brush washer. And this list, running right to left in impeccable imperial script, ends with the two characters ‘the best you’ve got’.
We turn another page.
A letter from the Office of the Head of the Imperial Household to the prefectural governor of Jingdezhe
n that they have received 900 objects and that 500 of them were unacceptable as the glaze quality was inferior, and there were chips or breakages. So the payments have been reduced.
And the talk of money starts to animate our hot huddle. My pleasure in the commissioning of goldfish bowls for the Summer Palace is overtaken by the vigorous discussion of the vicious discounts that Beijing demanded.
Or demands. The archive is alive.
We turn again:
In my five years as Imperial Commissioner for Porcelain, this being the fifth year of the emperor Yang Zheng, I have overseen the manufacture of 152,000 pieces of porcelain. In doing so I have used 30,000 silver thalers of my own – and other officials’ – money to make up the deficit. In winter the weather here in Jingdezhen is terrible and it is too cold and then it rains incessantly and it is too wet for porcelain to dry. So I have had to build a small shelter. Out of my own money.
Crammed in, almost on top of this plea for deliverance from this wretched role, are two running lines of reply in untidy and hasty script: ‘I read everything. I understand. Continue.’
This starts another conversation. Was it written by the emperor himself or by a private secretary writing to dictation?
Because I’m feeling breathless, I ask for the final volume.
iii
It is the book of the Last Emperor Puyi, who reigned from 1908 to 1912.
We look through for the final order of porcelain from the emperor to Jingdezhen. It takes ages. Pages and pages of the volume are messy, slipshod records of inventories, some torn and over-stained. These are not in court script but in a rapid vernacular. There is someone counting in the room as this is being written. This page is recording losses: an imperial court trying to stem the daily flow of theft, the seeping away of prestige as objects disappear from room and storeroom. Nothing adds up in these pages of porcelain lists anymore.
There are documents reporting that:
according to the guards Yong Kuan and Wen Mou, on the 11th day of the 10th month of 1908, the first storage room of the eastern quarter of Porcelain Store Number Five showed signs that it had been broken into. After investigation, it was revealed that sixty-six pieces of porcelain were missing, including fifty Kangxi marked yellow-ground bowls decorated with green dragons, six green-ground dragons decorated with aubergine dragons and ten Jiaquing marked bowls with clouds and cranes. The guards on duty at the time were handed over to the Shen-xing-si Bureau of Punishment for supervision.
The porcelain thief named Li Deer has been arrested. He has a number of damaged porcelains in his possession.
Li Deer’s gang got in by disguising themselves with officials’ hats, hid until nightfall, dislodged loose tiles on the porcelain store, hauled themselves up with ropes. They split up and sold the porcelains on.
On the twenty-fourth of the fifth month of 1909, there is an order for ‘one white porcelain vase, four white porcelain ju vessels, one white porcelain bowl, and twelve large white porcelain dishes. The vessels will be placed in front of the portrait of the late Empress Xiao Qin Xian for ritual purposes.’
And then the final order.
It is not an order, but a reply on the third of the third month of 1911, to the emperor, then a boy of five. It says that we received your letter, but we cannot fulfil a demand for one hundred seven-inch dishes glazed in sacrificial red. We no longer have the skills. So we are sending a hundred white dishes with red dragons on them.
There are now nine people around this manuscript, caught up in the exchanges. It is an archive but a librarian takes a cigarette out of the packet and lights up. He holds his cigarette like W. H. Auden.
There is no apology here, just the statement of what they are sending. And when this is collectively translated and the silence around apology is realised there is a moment when this is absorbed.
A thousand years of imperial porcelain ends on this. For the first time in decades I feel like a cigarette.
Chapter twelve
setting out
i
Rain all night. And a party. Possibly a party? Not one I’d been invited to.
After the day in the archive I gave a talk last night to students in a hall in a factory. It was Friday night – it still is Friday night – and I’d assumed I’d get a dozen earnest potters with notebooks, but it was completely packed. There was no one to translate so I’d been more animated than usual, hoping enthusiasm would be enough to get me through. Then questions. And it had become clear that this was 250 students from a college doing English Comprehension.
Dear God. The poor kids. Me on making pots, when all they want to ask is Do you like Chinese Food? Do you have a Big Family?
And in my room I cannot sleep. It’s the rain on the tiles and the noise of happy people, ducking in and out, umbrellas, puddles, the whole drink-night-ballet and it’s the idiocy of being here so far from my Big Family.
And the balloon of energy after talking, the effort to make energy in a room work, keep eye contact, keep light, pitch it right, is deflated. I feel like I’ve been on the road doing this for ever. A few earnest years on orientalism, on the influence of Japan in the West. A decade or so talking up why things matter and why it is good to make, from my mid-thirties. Five hard years or so on why objects need histories, and why artists and makers need to write, to artists and makers who don’t believe me and just wish someone else would do it for them.
And then the last couple of years about Jewishness, which was a change in subject and in audience demographic. I’ve been away far too much, breathing out, stretching out the balloon until it is taut, until it floats across the heads of a crowd in a darkened auditorium, somewhere.
How many times did I get it wrong, talking into the darkness about the Anschluss, or Proust or Bernard Leach, when all they really wanted was Chinese Food?
The rain comes down.
I think of Thomas Merton, the American hermit, sitting in his cabin in the Kentucky woods listening to the rain, ‘All that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody.’
ii
It is three in the morning again. I try and count pots. This is what I do to get to sleep. Because I’m here I count all the bowls and lidded jars and dishes that I’ve made to emulate Chinese porcelains, the ginger jars and the celadon tea bowls and wine cups, and the large dishes with the pairs of fishes, head to tail, that I made as wedding presents. The bodged, earnest attempt to make pots that had some of the ease, deftness and poise of the most basic bowl from this city. To make myself into a potter through my attachment to Chinese pots.
My tally comes to nothing, scant thousands amongst this roiling sea of objects.
I try and count my childhood pots and my apprenticeship pots and the pots that I made on my own in my first independent workshop on the Welsh Borders. I moved there straight from university. I was setting out, I was twenty-one.
I count my Herefordshire pots.
Herefordshire is green on green, lichen on old apple branches, ivy in the woods, the rot in the floorboards. A mile away from my workshop was a cottage where an old woman left for the workhouse a generation ago. The stream comes under the door. There are rags in the windows. This feels about right. On the walk up the hill behind the house, scrambling over the fence next to the old oak, and then up the pitch scarified by sheep tracks, your eyes on the steep ground until you get to the hedge line, hawthorn and brambles, when you turn and get the whole landscape of hills unfolded to the Black Mountains, five miles away across the border in Wales. There are a thousand gradations of damp underfoot. There are a pair of buzzards above the copse. There has been a badger here: the red earth is churned.
My friends were in London with jobs, writing, partying, getting on with careers and affairs, and I was making dishes, unglazed, rough oatmeal brown on the outside, and green on the inside, pots to disappear into the landscape. No one bought them. No one liked them. This is usually an artist’s trope – as in no one liked them except, say, Peggy Guggenheim – but
in my case they were genuinely unlikeable because they had that killer factor for objects. They were needy. And once you recognise neediness in an object, it is difficult to live with. The fluidity of your life with it curdles.
They wanted to change their users, not just make you feel better as you poured your milk in the morning, spooned marmalade from the jar on to your toast, but be a better person. I felt this was the quietist approach to making pots, stealthily changing lives through balanced handles, grounding people through giving objects an appropriate weight, valuing the everyday. Why stand out when you could disappear? But my pots stood out in their quietness, mumbling really loudly, clutching.
I thought Chinese pots were quiet. I lie in my small room transfixed by embarrassment, by that earnest gaucherie of thirty years ago. Dear God, I thought Chinese pots were simple. And I had so deeply absorbed the mantra of truth to materials that I hadn’t noticed that the materials I was trying so hard to be true to were highly specific. And odd. Making these pots out of this stoneware clay, glazing them so doggedly with this midwinter palette of browns and greys and moss-greens was an exercise in attempting to get belief off the ground. If I could keep it going then I wouldn’t notice that I was channelling an aesthetic from fifty years ago.
There is a moment when the idea that something is a vocation becomes so internalised that you end up a priest, a potter, a poet, and you are just too embarrassed to walk away. And you get caught. There is a bit in T. S. Eliot’s The Confidential Clerk where Sir Claude Mulhammer, the old financier, confesses that he always wanted to be a potter, but failed from family pressure and anxiety: ‘Could a man be said to have a vocation / To be a second-rate potter?’
The White Road Page 8