The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  Why should blinds come down? Why should rooms be this height?

  The only thing he doesn’t seem to have questioned was the colour of the building, its internal walls, the steps and window frames. They are white. Perhaps white was a query for Wittgenstein?

  There are books in my room upstairs at the studio still in their packages, bought at night, necessary for all my journeys. I have the score of John Cage’s 4'33" on top of the pile. I run my hands over this ridiculous heap of possibilities, of weeks of detours and re-routings. I was to be the Emperor of White. There was to be a journey through white pages. I was going to move from Tristram Shandy to Samuel Beckett.

  What have I missed?

  I’ve given up on my lists. My three white porcelain cups have become five objects of porcelain. My three white hills have become four. I’ve been taken elsewhere.

  ii

  I go to Cambridge and I put out the white pots from Jingdezhen from 800 years ago on the new porcelain tiles from three years ago. They look very beautiful.

  I put out my shards and the Jingdezhen copies of Wedgwood’s vases, and some very early Meissen porcelain. And I hide a very small installation of my own pots in the museum too. I write about all these favourite pots and we print a modest catalogue with line drawings on a sort of bible paper. This feels like a kind of paying of dues. I call the exhibition On White.

  iii

  A few days after Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London is opened to the public, it is closed, so that you cannot walk on the porcelain due to the dust.

  I read the paper, Cohort mortality study in three ceramic factories in Jingdezhen in China, Xiaokang Zhang et al., 2003. I read up on Potter’s Rot, silicosis, on what happens when clay becomes dust. The potter ‘exists in it and by it; it fills his lungs and blanches his cheek; it keeps him alive and it kills him. His fingers close round it, as round the hand of a friend,’ writes Arnold Bennett looking over the Potteries.

  I open the report of the doctor in Staffordshire, so warmly welcomed into the workshops of potters, and hear Samuel Broster, aged thirty-three, ‘I am the father of two children, and would not let my children work at it, not if ever so well paid.’

  And I think of the man at the big-pot factory in Jingdezhen and his silence and the not wanting his kids to follow him into the dust. And I remember passing the door of the decal factory nearby where they prepare the images that are placed on to the porcelain like transfers. And seeing three boys working a huge machine that is spewing out dust into the chemical air.

  This white porcelain has cost.

  Obsession costs. Porcelain is a success. Porcelain consumes hills, the wood on the hills, it silts the rivers and clogs the harbours, enters the deltas of your lungs.

  I remember my years in the workshop, sweeping. And if it costs me, that is one thing. But it is the cost to others, to all those children in the factories in Staffordshire and Jingdezhen, to the men standing by the burning lenses in the cellars with Tschirnhaus, to the boy collecting moss on the moors to dry the clay, the professor broken in the Cultural Revolution, and the modeller of the figures killed on the electric fence in Dachau.

  This, I think, is what I’ve been trying to trace, the glimpse of white rising and then sinking below the waves again, the wind catching and eddying white dust, settling and resettling.

  iv

  I’ve been reading the poet Paul Celan. His poetry has been a constant for me over thirty years, but I only found his Darmstadt lecture a couple of years ago. It was 1960 and Celan had won a prize. He rarely wrote prose, rarely gave lectures. There are only two interviews. A response to a request is five lines long.

  This lecture is hard and hesitant. It keeps trying to start. His first sentence begins with a word and a pause. ‘Art, you will remember, is a…’

  There are snags, he writes, after nine lines. He is right. There are snags. He is trying to find out how a poem happens, how it comes into being. So he looks with concentration at the routes towards a poem and he tries to find when exactly the critical moment happens, the ‘terrifying falling silent’ that presages poetry.

  This is what he calls the breathturn, the strange moment of pause between breathing in and breathing out, when your sense of self is suspended and you are open to everything.

  Celan cannot find words to fit together easily. German is his language, but he is Jewish and German is also the language that killed his family. So Celan brings words together into newness, Lichtzwang, lightduress. Atemwende, breathturn. He compacts words and he breaks them open, spills them from one line to another.

  His poems get shorter. They become fragments, cries, exhalations, attempts to start, attempts to make sound. The spaces around the poems get larger. There is more white page than words in his last books of poetry.

  And in this lecture, as he writes of the routes into poems, he explores how these can also be re-routings and detours from who you are. He says that you send yourself ahead, in search of yourself. The imagery is of paths, of setting out, of digressions and a ‘kind of homecoming’.

  There is no straight road to finding yourself, to making something.

  And then he thanks us for listening: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I find something which consoles me a bit for having walked this impossible road in your presence, this road of the impossible.’ And Celan walks off down the impossible road.

  Celan makes me think of how grateful you are for some company on the road, that it is this consolation, someone walking part of the way by your side, that means almost everything. Everything.

  I think that Père d’Entrecolles had his friend the Mandarin, and that Tschirnhaus had Leibniz, and that William had Swedenborg and always had Sally, lost, but promised for the white eternity ahead. I have found their company on this journey too.

  And I have Sue and our children. This is my white road.

  v

  I sit at my wheel. It is low and I am tall. I hunch. There is a ziggurat of balls of porcelain clay to my left, a waiting pile of ware boards to my right, a small bucket of water, a sponge, a knife and a bamboo rib shaped like a hand axe in front of me. I have a cloth on my lap to wipe my hands. There is music, somewhere.

  My dog is nearby. And coffee.

  I make small vessels in porcelain, three or four inches high. I make them quickly, leaving the top edge ragged or elliptical. After a couple of hours I can pick them up to trim them with a knife, rapid cuts, and then run a thumb along the base to smooth it clean. And then I press in my seal.

  After thirty years it is now worn smooth of a name or place. It is just an empty oblong.

  I use my porcelain from Limoges, near to where Père d’Entrecolles was born. I use my china clay, mined twenty miles from Tregonning Hill, the place where William found white earth.

  I make 2,455 pots and they are glazed in whites.

  I use all the accomplished, attempted, consolatory, melancholy, minatory, lambent whites from my journey. All the whites from Jingdezhen, ‘white as congealed mutton fat’, and Kakiemon and Nanjing and Tibet and Venice and Saint-Cloud and Dresden, ‘milk white, like a narcissus’, and Meissen and Coxside on the Plymouth docks, ‘white like smoke’, and Bristol and Etruria and Carolina and St Petersburg and the Bauhaus. And Allach. And now here, in my new studio in West Norwood next to the bus garage.

  And I place them on shelves in vitrines seven feet high and eight feet across. I call this quartet of installations breathturn. There are rhythms, repeated sequences of pots, and there are attempted rhythms, pauses and caesuras. There are congestions and releases. There is more white space than words.

  The vitrines are photographed and then my pots are numbered and wrapped and crated and sent across the world and unwrapped and I put them back on their shelves.

  This is my exhibition in New York. I call it Atemwende.

  Sue is there, of course, and the children are let off school for a long weekend. It is their first time in New York, so we eat piz
za in Chelsea and walk in Central Park and they are lovely about the work and proud, and I take them round, our Big Family.

  Detail of breathturn, I, 2013

  And I’m asked at the opening, How is it possible to make white things? This question is the same question I was asked as a child. It is still a good question to ask. And I’m asked if I get bored sitting at my wheel, do my assistants make the pots? And I’m asked if I’m writing again?

  To which I answer that white is a way of starting again. It is not about good taste, that making white pots was never about good taste, that making porcelain is a way of starting again, finding your way, a route and a detour to yourself. And that I don’t get bored. That I make them myself.

  And that no, I’m not writing. I have written. And I am making again.

  Further reading

  There is a vast literature on porcelain, its manufacture and consumption. For a guide to those I have found most useful, with signposts towards books and articles that may prove illuminating, please see www.edmunddewaal.com/writing.

  List of illustrations

  Information concerning illustrations is displayed as follows: page number; caption; copyright owner; source (where known)

  Pages from Père d’Entrecolles’ letters on Chinese porcelain, 1722; Archives des Jésuites de France, Vanves

  Watercolour of the Gaignières-Fonthill vase, 1713; Bibliothèque Nationale de France

  Mark of Kangxi

  Saggar containing a porcelain shard, Jingdezhen, 2012; Edmund de Waal

  Map of Jingdezhen from the Tao Lu, 1815; Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library; Ching-te-chen: views of a porcelain city, Robert Tichane, The New York State Institute for Glaze Research, Painted Post, 1983

  Porcelain shards on the riverbank, Jingdezhen, 1920; National Geographic / Frank B. Lenz; ‘The world’s ancient porcelain center’, from National Geographic, July–Dec, 1920, vol 38

  Woodcut from the Tao Lu showing the preparation of porcelain moulds, 1815; Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library; Ching-te-chen: views of a porcelain city, Robert Tichane, The New York State Institute for Glaze Research, Painted Post, 1983

  Grinding cobalt, Jingdezhen, 1938; Early Ming wares of Chingtechen, A.D. Brankston, Henri Vetch, Peking, 1938

  Page from the Collected Statutes of the Great Ming Dynasty, 1587; Gest Oriental Library and East Asian Collections, Princeton University; Ten Thousand Things: module and mass production in Chinese art, Lothar Ledderose, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Chichester, 2000

  Engraving of the porcelain pagoda, Nanjing, 1665; The British Library; Het Gezantschap der Neêrlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie (etc), Johan Nieuhof, Amsterdam, 1693

  Monk’s cap ewer, Yongle Dynasty, 1403–25; © The Trustees of the British Museum

  Silk scroll painting of Lang Tingji by Lu Xue, 1697; Qingdao Municipal Museum; ‘Lang Tingji (1663–1715) and the porcelain of the late Kangxi period’, Peter Y.K. Lam, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramics Society, 2003–2004

  Mark of Meissen

  Etching of the Trianon de Porcelaine, Versailles, c.1680; Bibliothèque Nationale de France

  Tschirnhaus, 1708; SLUB Dresden / Deutsche Fotothek / Regine Richter

  Engraving of Dresden, 1721; SLUB Dresden / Deutsche Fotothek / André Rous

  Tschirnhaus’s burning lens, made in 1686, photograph from 1926; Der Goldmacher, Joh. Fr. Böttger, Eugen Kalkschmidt, Died & Co, Stuttgart, 1926

  Engraving of an alchemist, from Twelve Keys of Basilius Valentinus, 1678; Wellcome Library London

  Albrechtsburg Castle, Meissen, 1891; SLUB Dresden / Deutsche Fotothek / Antonio Ermenegildo Donadini

  Page from Böttger’s notebook showing his first porcelain tests, 15 January 1708; © Meissen Couture, Meissen Archive

  Meissen porcelain cup, c.1715; Edmund de Waal / Ian Skelton

  Design for the Japanisches Palais, Dresden, 1730; SLUB Dresden / Deutsche Fotothek / Martin Würker

  Mark of Cookworthy; Plymouth City Archives

  Watercolour of No. 2 Plough Court, London, c.1860; Wellcome Library London; Plough Court: the story of a notable pharmacy, 1715–1927, Ernest Cripps, Allen & Hanbury, London, 1927

  William Cookworthy, c.1740; Wellcome Library London

  Diagram of divining rods from Mineralogia Cornubiensis, 1778; The British Library; Mineralogia Cornubiensis, (reprint), William Pryce, D. Bradford Barton, Truro, 1972

  Mark of Wedgwood

  Shards from Cookworthy's porcelain experiments, c. 1766; Cornwall Record Office; F/4/80

  Map of Cherokee country, 1765; University of Pittsburgh Library; Art of the Cherokee, Susan C. Power, University of Georgia Press, London, 2007

  The bottom of Cookworthy’s porcelain tankard, 1768; © The Trustees of the British Museum

  Drawing of Cookworthy’s kiln by Champion, 1770; Two Centuries of Ceramic Art in Bristol, being a history of the manufacture of ‘The true porcelain’ by R. Champion, Hugh Owen, London, 1873

  Engraving of Champion’s memorial to his Eliza, 1779; Two Centuries of Ceramic Art in Bristol, being a history of the manufacture of ‘The true porcelain’ by R. Champion, Hugh Owen, London, 1873

  Hensleigh Wedgwood and the Cherokee clay memorial, 11 August 1950; North Carolina Museum of History

  Admission ticket to Wedgwood’s copy of the Portland Vase, 1790; © The Trustees of the British Museum

  Postcard of Stoke-on-Trent, c.1903; Staffordshire Archives and Heritage

  Girls working in a slip house, Stoke-on-Trent, c.1900–1910; The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery / William Blake

  Mark of Allach

  Potter in Jingdezhen, 1920; National Geographic / Frank B. Lenz; ‘The world’s ancient porcelain center’, from National Geographic, July–Dec, 1920, vol 38

  Himmler inspecting Allach porcelain, Dachau, 20 January 1941; Image Bank WW2 – NIOD; Beeldbank WO2, Amsterdam

  Himmler’s birthday gifts to Hitler of Allach figurines, Berlin, 20 April 1944; Bayerische Staatsbibliothek / Heinrich Hoffmann

  Allach porcelain shop, Warsaw, 1941; Archiwum Cyfrowe Warsaw

  Hans Landauer, Vienna, 2006; Heribert Corn

  Workers making plaques of Mao, Heilongjiang Province, 1968; Contact Press Images / Li Zhensheng; Mao Cult: rhetoric and ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution, Daniel Leese, Cambridge University Press, 2011

  Mark of Edmund de Waal

  Detail of breathturn, I, 2013; Gagosian Gallery / Mike Bruce

  Acknowledgements

  This is a book that has been many years in the writing and I am grateful to the great generosity of considerable numbers of people for their encouragement, advice, hospitality and open sharing of hard-won knowledge.

  For research assistance and for translations, I’m very grateful to Dr. Kristina Meier, Dr. Wolf Burchard, Richard Lowkes and Ivy Chan.

  For help in Jingdezhen and Shanghai, I would like to thank Tao-Tao Chang, Dr. James Lin, Caroline Cheng and Eric Kao. For advice on Chinese porcelain, conversations with Stacey Pierson, Jan Stuart, Mike Hearn, Peter Y.K. Lam and the late Sir Michael Butler were illuminating. In Dresden, Hartwig Fischer was hugely supportive and Dr. Ulrich Pietsch, Dr. Michael Korey, Dr. Christian Kurtzke, Falk Diessner, Peter, Sylvia Braun, Anke Scharrahs and Claudia Gulden helped in many ways. Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, Dr. Sebastian Kuhn and Henry Arnholdt were generous with insights into Meissen. At the Dachau archives, Albert Knoll was invaluable with his knowledge on Allach, and his friendship with the late Hans Landauer. In Dublin, Dr. Audrey Whitty gave me a day with the Fonthill Vase, in Amsterdam Menno Fitski gave me time with Kakiemon at the Rijksmuseum.

  In North Carolina I had energetic help from Annie Carlano and Brian Gallagher at the Mint Museum, Charles Locke Moffett Jr., Martha Daniels and Katy Bruce at the Mulberry Plantation, and two wonderful days in the company of Jerry Anselmo. Christopher Benty made the journey before me and wrote of it beautifully in his memoir.

  My f
riends at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Dr. Martin Roth, Dr. Hilary Young, Alun Graves and Dr. Reino Liefkes helped with English porcelain, Mark Damazer with Wedgwood, Richard Hamblyn with Plough Court, Mary Laven with Matteo Ricci, John Scantlebury with Cornwall. Thank you to the late Jeremy Theophilus for initiating the exhibition with the Fitzwilliam Museum and Tim Knox and Victoria Avery for making it happen. I’m grateful to Clare Tavernor, Alan Yentob and Jonty Claypole for their support on the Imagine documentary for the BBC.

  Thank you to the archivists and librarians of the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University Library, British Library, London Library, National Art Library, British Museum, Swedenborg Society, Cornwall Record Office, Plymouth and West Devon Record Office, Bristol Record Office, the Wedgwood Museum archive, Bonham’s in London, Stroke-on-Trent City Archive, Sotheby’s in London and New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, the North Carolina Museum of History, the Dresden State Art Collections, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, Meissen archive, Saxon State archive, Dresden city archive, Albrechtsburg Castle, Berlin State Library and Dachau Concentration Camp archive.

  Thank you to my tremendous studio team of Sam Bakewell, Stephanie Forrest, Jemima Johnson, Sun Kim and Barry Stedman, and to my friends Charlie Moffett, the late Michael Harrison, Mark Francis, Sheena Wagstaff, Tim Eicke and Daniel Morgan who kept talking to me when others would have given up.

  For all their help in making this book happen, I’d like to thank the amazing Jonathan Galassi and Louise Dennys, Ileene Smith, Simon Bradley, Zöe Pagnamenta, Felicitas Feuilhauer, Herbert Ohrlinger, Andrew Nurnberg, Eleonoora Kirk, Kate Bland, Ruth Warburton, Mari Yamazaki and Jeff Seroy. John Morgan and Stephen Parker and Ian Skelton for their beautiful book design. Susannah Otter has been indefatigable as my assistant editor.

  Nerissa Taysom is a marvellous researcher, assistant and reader. Felicity Bryan is a wonderful agent and a wonderful friend and in Clara Farmer, I have an editor and publisher whose clarity, imagination and patience are extraordinary. I am truly grateful for her ambition for this book.