My workshop was an old barn. I bought the wheels, ware boards, sieves and buckets from a failed pottery, too young to notice their relief as I counted out the £1,000 that I had saved, £20 note by £20 note. And I bought their old kiln bricks and spent a long summer building my own kiln, sawing a wooden former to create the arch of the kiln-chamber, trying to work out how high a chimney should be to create the pull of air to make the temperatures work. The local blacksmith made me metal ties to keep the structure together and soldered blowtorches to make basic burners for the propane gas I was to use for fuel. This came in tall and unwieldy orange canisters.
My kiln looked like a small chapel. I’d crawl inside to stack my pots on the three shelves at the back and two at the front, then brick up the front wall, leaving a couple of gaps as spyholes, light the gas so the flame roared into the kiln, fiddle with the air vents, the pressure gauges, the bricks at the chimney mouth.
There are electric kilns, which are like big cookers. You switch them on and they heat up and they click off. They can go wrong, but their wrongness is quite pedestrian. You can see the mistakes. And then there are kilns which use wood or coal or gas to produce the heat through fire. And this brings a different level of unpredictability.
I hated it. Over fifteen, eighteen, twenty hours, I’d try and nurse the kiln towards a heat that would make my glazes melt, the colour of the clay change from grey. Firings scared me. The intensity of the fire, the knowledge of just how badly I’d built the kiln, the sound of the kiln straining, the need for this firing to work to make up for the last months, the malevolent lick of flame over my gloves as I pulled out test rings. I knew so little. I’d watch the colour of the kiln change from reds to oranges to yellow to a searing white. I was by myself.
And my Herefordshire tally comes to forty-two firings over two and a half years. Twelve total failures. Twenty mostly wrong and ten OK. So 2,500 pots out to sell, a few hundred chucked from the kiln mouth over the hedge into the stream. A couple of thousand or so broken up for shards. And a pathetic income. Soup bowls were £2.50 each. My girlfriend Sue in London bought a huge black pitcher. That was £12, full cost as she insisted on no discount.
I needed to leave. I needed to find somewhere cheap and far away. This led me to Sheffield.
iii
It was 1988 and the city was in a terrible way after a decade of decline in steel, the miners’ strike. The city centre was full of boarded-up shops. In Page Hall, a hill of back-to-back terraced houses on the edges of Attercliffe where the last steelworks were being demolished, I found a house and workshop that had been used as a carpenter’s shop. 128 Robey Street was the end of the road. Beyond was Wincobank, a hill of scrub and burnt-out cars. From the top you looked across the cooling towers to the M1 and Rotherham.
It was skinny at the front with a door that no one used, but round the back was a yard with a two-storey outbuilding, a raddled floor and a capsized roof, but enough space to build a kiln and make pots. My neighbours were mostly Bangladeshi, one generation in, with a seam of old white Sheffielders to put me right on tea and politics and geography.
I rented a van and loaded it with my potter’s wheel, and kiln bricks and clay and my books, and left Herefordshire. I was going to be an urban potter. I painted the floors of my house white, built my bookshelves out of pine planks and bricks and put my futon on the floor. I lived, I felt, in bohemian splendour, a tin chandelier in the kitchen and an old steamer trunk of my grandmother’s for my clothes, but at almost thirty years’ distance I see the squalor more than the bohemia. When I was burgled they took a metal bench for scrap and my stereo and two Hiroshige prints. Everything else, all the shelves of ceramics, shelves of Japanese tea bowls, my Hogarth print of The The Distrest Poet, wig askew, dog stealing the bone from his dusty garret, were untouched.
I knew no one. This was a place chosen because I knew no one. I got to work. As I was starting again, I chose white.
I ordered three bags of porcelain.
The very first pot I made at the end of this steep hill was a porcelain jar. It was an attempt to make a mallet jar, a kinuta, a form made in the Sung Dynasty and then revived periodically. It is a beautiful shape based on a mallet that you might use to beat cloth, a flared rim from a long neck that emerges from a swelled body.
The porcelain was sticky. It wouldn’t draw up. I’d wanted to make a porcelain jar that floated, but this felt like being twelve again, in a school uniform with an apron, Geoffrey watching from his wheel as pot after pot folded under my touch, returning me to failure.
My jar was a few inches high, and heavy. I glazed it white.
I was twenty-four. Wayne and Ricky, brothers of twelve and ten from the next street, came around on the first day, looking for jobs, curious. They helped me unload the van. What’s it all about? It was a very good question to ask anyone. It is a very good question to ask.
It is dawn in Jingdezhen when I start to count my Sheffield pots.
iv
I’m not sure if it’s the monastic connection, thinking of Thomas Merton in his white robes, trying to make sense of the East from far away, but my Jesuit, Père d’Entrecolles here in the city in his black robes, seems very close.
I’ve read and reread his two famous letters from this city.
Being a Jesuit he was very good at detail – have you ever heard of a sloppy, disorganised Jesuit? – and his letters are immediate and wry and often very funny. He likes people, assesses them with candour, expects to be taken seriously, but I realise that I’ve been reading the letters for colour, for information, checking on how kaolin gets purified.
For three centuries they have been translated, gutted for information, quoted, misunderstood, returned to for gleanings. His thoughts and images recur. And his words too. He borrows petunse and kaolin from the potters here in Jingdezhen and these two namings of materials stay sentinel over the fierce attempt to find the Arcanum, the mystery of porcelain in Europe and America.
In this place which seems to be all about sending things far away, I’m thinking of him sending these ideas home.
v
I wonder how he felt here. Not homesick. It would be a trespass to suggest that he lies in his bed thinking of the greenness of Limoges where he grew up, that the rain sounds different here from there. It would be trespass to think that he knew of the white clays of home. But I know he had a very rough time when he arrived in China.
Père François Xavier d’Entrecolles was thirty-five.
He had entered the novitiate at eighteen and had been a priest for seven years, before being singled out for this mission. He landed on 24 July 1699 in Amoy. He had been travelling for eighteen months on a succession of ships, starting in a convoy of the French king’s led by the Amphritrite, stopping at the Canary Islands, then the Green Cape, a Portuguese archipelago to the west of Senegal, then round the Cape of Good Hope, Bengal – where he changed to the much smaller Joanna – on to Madras then Batavia, and finally, to China. Other fathers embarked or were left at ports along the way.
He writes to his friend in Lyons that Father Burin was fortunate to have died en route to China.
He lands. Matteo Ricci, the first great Jesuit missioner to China, a century earlier, had warned against his fathers having too much contact with Europeans. They should be amongst the Chinese for as much time as possible.
Some fathers were chosen for the capital. Others for the provinces.
Père d’Entrecolles was sent by himself to Jao-tcheou, a dozen miles from Jingdezhen. There was not a single Christian there and when he wanted to purchase a ‘crumbling house to live in’, there was opposition from the local Mandarins. The first Christian, he writes, was the builder who constructed the chapel.
It was imperative that the fathers learned both to speak and to write the language. Ricci warned that learning Chinese was not like learning Greek or German. It was altra cosa, something else. Ricci’s own translation of Confucius’ Analects and the Great Learning were used for langua
ge training for missionaries who had just arrived. This tells you everything.
I think of Père d’Entrecolles assailed by the noise of a new continent, its smells, the grip of the humidity on your limbs, hearing the rise and fall of voices, not knowing how to stand, or bow, or whether to look in someone’s eyes, or avert your gaze, what the shake of a head means, how to eat, what this food is, what this food was. He is here and you are supposed to stay and put aside any thoughts of return to wherever home might be, whoever home is, and all that the rhythms of these night rains in July tell you is that you are you away, away, away.
vi
‘One rain, and all the flowers gone / Third watch, and all the music still / except what strikes my ear and stays my sleep / from a windy branch / the last drops fall.’
Above all I think of this new language that Père d’Entrecolles has to learn. Merton called his night rain ‘this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech’.
Chapter thirteen
Men in black
i
Know your witness.
It sounds so straightforward. Père d’Entrecolles isn’t a footnote. What he saw and why he saw it is the story.
I want him out of quotation marks, away from the academic swell at the bottom of the pages of cultural history. The encounter between Jesuits and China has been firmly and repeatedly shaken down by historians of science, by Sinologists and by Jesuit apologists. It is a terrific story. But these shelves of informed, passionate reorderings of these decades are nothing to the walls of material, the scale of the writings of the Jesuits in China themselves. These are the books – pace them out. These are the archives – fathomless.
Did they do anything else? This is a real question. The imperative to write was central to a Jesuit’s mission. Wherever you were – stuck in some remote part of a country or across the city – you would write letters and reports on every aspect of your spiritual and temporal life to your superior with regularity. Writing was an act of self-reflection, a catechising of yourself before God. You write and you send. And you wait.
But you have not been sent to this country to have problems with your faith, though the fathers are pragmatic enough to know that this happens, but to be alive to knowledge, to look hard and note and learn, to order your thoughts and make them coherent. You are God’s spy abroad in a new world. You are a witness. Write it down. Write it down with exactitude.
I find the only known manuscript of Père d’Entrecolles in the Jesuit archive in Chantilly. It is a couple of pages. And pleasingly, it is a listing of all the points he wants to make about his time in Jingdezhen, an index of his life in the city. He has beautiful handwriting. It flows.
ii
Père d’Entrecolles made friends. He made converts amongst the potters of Jingdezhen. He founded a school ‘with small classes for the education of children’, and wrote to Paris of how he longed for funds to create other schools: ‘it would be necessary to pay for a good teacher, schooling is to be free; the master is respected by the parents and treated with honour’. The missionary would supervise both the master and the students. ‘This teacher could also, by entering into contact with the families, encourage an appreciation for Christianity.’ The children called him Mr Dr.
His Chinese was fluent. He wrote that he had been looking into some of the old books on the region in which he was stationed, the gazetteers which map the history and economy of the area, and making notes about what they say and what he sees. He was conscientious, so well regarded, that on 20 March 1707, though far from the capital, he was elected superior general for the Jesuit mission to China.
In other matters he was lucky. His luck came in another friendship, that of ‘the mandarin of Jingdezhen who has honoured me with his friendship’. Lang Tingji was appointed governor of Jiangxi in the summer of 1705 and stayed for seven years before promotion took him away; these seven years overlap with Père d’Entrecolles. There is a silk handscroll portrait of Lang sitting on a rock over a ravine in a pale blue robe that bunches up over his impressive paunch, leaning on one hand, the other nonchalant on a knee, and he radiates capaciousness. You look at him and think conversation. You look again and you see his astuteness. He knows the drop to his left.
Lang was adept. Every March and May he sent gifts to the Kangxi emperor of fine ink-cakes, a speciality of the region, a present suitably matched for a scholarly Son of Heaven. And the records show that the emperor gave Lang gifts of deer meat from the annual imperial hunting expeditions, an expression of favour in return. Through Lang, on the second day of the third month of 1709, Père d’Entrecolles sent the Kangxi emperor sixty-six bottles of wine ‘and other imported Western rarities’. The emperor was very pleased, and told Lang that in future all offerings should be recorded in detail. This was noted in his vermilion endorsements.
Silk scroll painting of Lang Tingji by Lu Xue, c.1710
The emperor got given a lot of presents, delicate scientific instruments and grand artefacts, inlaid and gilded and resplendent. It took a French priest in the provinces to send the emperor of China some wine.
Lang was born a bondsman, the class which the emperor favoured for complex assignments, and was the son of a governor, but his interests were his own. Lang loved porcelain. He ‘makes for his protectors at court some presents of old-style porcelain that he has the talent for making himself. I can say that he has found the technique of imitating ancient porcelain, or at least of recent antiques. For this project he uses a number of workers’, wrote Père d’Entrecolles.
So the Mandarin and the missionary looked at the city. One saw porcelain. The other saw people at work.
iii
The Mandarin saw possibility.
With an emperor who knows what porcelain can do, came the chance to impress. This was a city in the ascendant with new glazes, new porcelain bodies and new ways of decorating.
All emperors get porcelain made for them. Some care. Some don’t. And no matter what the art historians say, imperial porcelain can be exceptionally rare, or important, but it can also be vulgar, or odd or just banal. With Kangxi porcelain, it is informed.
So for the sixtieth birthday celebrations of the emperor, Lang commissioned dishes. Where someone less adroit might go for, say, carp, Lang came up with a magpie and three persimmons, a malicious Ted Hughes magpie, red-eyed, guarding the fruit. And a dish of four geese, two eating, one looking up and one in flight. There were also dishes and small saucers painted with peaches, the fruit so adeptly shaded that you feel your fingers hover.
These dishes referenced poems. The emperor writes and writes. To quote or allude was to bring yourself nearer to him. So allusions multiplied in the porcelains of these years, they glanced at poetry, or novels or philosophy, or they sat down, and illustrated. Some large vases have continuous narratives – imagine the action of unrolling a scroll so that you see one part of the story at a time. A vast phoenix-tail vase ascends from fisherman near the base, through mists and hills, streams, and waterfalls, geese flying, all the way to scholars in their craggy retreats. Others have panels, or reserves, in which actions can be placed like frames in a cartoon.
Older styles returned, but in moderation. And Lang encouraged skills. The copper-red glazes – known as sang-de-boeuf, or oxblood, in the West – were named Langyao after him. These glazes come near the top in terms of technical impossibility, layerings of clear and copper-rich glazes allowing for depths of colour.
Take this brush washer, made in the year of their meeting, one of a set of eight peach-bloom vessels for the scholar’s desk, objects that would be arrayed for use and for contemplation as you drop water on to the stone, grind the ink, pick up your brush. The set are all curves, volumes that seem on the point of deliquescence like late summer fruit.
And the glaze named ‘drunken beauty’ in China, or ‘peach bloom’ by a Western scholar, softens the form even more. I don’t want to think of the late-night glowing pallor of a drunk, so think of a peach. Really think
of it, how the colour changes from yellows to pinks, blooms as imperceptibly as dawn, how the fruit gives slightly under your thumb. This glaze, too, is ludicrously difficult to achieve. Copper-lime pigment has to be sprayed through a long bamboo tube with a fine silk covering at the end on to a layer of transparent glaze, on to which you then put another layer of transparent glaze, before you fire it.
These effects are perfect for an emperor.
It is late porcelain. Forms are truncated or elongated, or transform demotic objects – chicken coops, turnips, horses’ hoofs – into objects of princely contemplation. Here is multiplicity, a covered box with a hundred boys at their games, a vase spendthrift with butterflies, or extravagant simplicity.
It is partly the slipperiness of the surfaces. This is what porcelain looks like: figurative, decorative, colourful, and delinquent. Expensive.
Kangxi is late porcelain. It is clever and it knows it. It is, I realise, an idea of porcelain.
iv
My Jesuit looks across the city and sees the work.
He sees people so poor that their bones are buried in pits, rather than in tombs. He sees clay-makers who can’t leave their compounding to come to church unless they can find someone to take their place. Cobalt-grinders grateful for work in old age.
He writes a letter about how things are made, but it is actually about compassion.
He is a witness. He is to stay in China for forty years until he dies. But he sends his letters home.
The Amphritrite, the ship that brought him to China, loads up to start the long journey back to France. It takes nine months and it arrives at Port Louis with letters from the Jesuit missions and bales of silk and lacquer and 167 crates of porcelain from Jingdezhen. This is advertised in the Mercure galant, the gossipy What’s On for the court at Versailles. There is to be an auction.
The White Road Page 9