The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

by Huan Hsu

  Jacinta dutifully showed me around. After seeing the studio spaces, resident accommodations, and an array of kilns—electric, soda, wood burning, and an environmentally friendly “smokeless” kiln designed in Japan—we walked up the road that ran the length of the factory. The entire plant had once been China’s national sculpture factory, and clustered around the Pottery Workshop’s properties were studios and workshops still being run by local artists and craftsmen. Small shops had taken up the square, garagelike spaces lining the road, their storefronts crowded with the products they specialized in: vases, bowls, and figurines of Buddhas, goddesses, and Mao Zedong. Lean, shirtless men, all bone and ropy muscles wormed with veins, ferried pieces in various stages of production on handcarts. Playing cards littered the street; the porters used them as shims to level the pieces on their carts.

  We arrived at a warehouse that the Pottery Workshop had rehabilitated into a large, airy work and lecture space with concrete floors and a high, slanted, churchlike roof, dubbed “Two Chimneys” for the twin spouts that rose up behind it. Contrasting the Pottery Workshop’s sleek, modern aesthetic, the sagging wooden shacks surrounding Two Chimneys housed dirty studios appointed with scavenged furniture; even the chimneys themselves had been cannibalized, filled with junk or hanging laundry.

  What I had seen so far of Jingdezhen looked nothing like the bucolic village of ascetic artisans I had imagined. Jacinta said I was naïve. Though Jingdezhen was indeed the mecca of porcelain, it had long since lost its cachet, having lapsed into churning out derivative, low-quality ceramics for low-end markets. Decals and electric kilns had replaced hand-painting and wood-fired kilns. As China industrialized, ceramics had followed the same model as light manufacturing: everyone cutting corners as they tried to squeeze out tiny profits from even tinier pieces of the market. Artistry was an anachronism. Intellectual property was a joke. That Jingdezhen still managed to produce ceramics at all was a triumph in itself.

  Jacinta had studied ballet for seven years as a child and aspired to become a professional dancer but wasn’t accepted into the state ballet school. She learned to draw when she decided to pursue becoming a makeup artist but didn’t get into the school for that, either. So she applied to the JCI, thinking she might develop an affinity for ceramics. “But I’m not cut out to be an artist,” she said. “I’m not crazy enough, or narcissistic enough. I’m not being modest. I sort of suck at ceramics.”

  Jacinta struck me as a kind of kindred spirit, too Chinese for some things and not Chinese enough for others. When she asked again what I was doing in Jingdezhen and why I was so interested in porcelain, I felt that I could trust her with the story of my great-great-grandfather’s porcelain and the relative who had supposedly served as an official here, which perked her up. She wasn’t very clear about the city’s history or where I might find any records of the porcelain my great-great-grandfather had obtained from here, but she urged me to talk to the Japanese artist who managed the Pottery Workshop, who had done his own research on the topic. And she persuaded me to stay through the weekend for the lecture and the market, where she said I might meet some people who could help answer my questions.

  I SPENT THE next few days wandering around the city in the August heat. On the corner of one large intersection near the university, seamstresses had set up a row of manual sewing machines. Across the street a little boy squatted before a hardware store, pushing a long shit out from his open-crotched pants. I ate noodles and pork buns from squalid, fly-infested holes in the wall. Even the drivers seemed too lethargic to bother honking as much as usual. Then I heard about an ancient kiln museum on the other side of town and hired a taxi to take me there.

  The museum was more like a re-created porcelain village, in a wooded area on the other side of the Chang River that sliced through Jingdezhen and that had for centuries served as its lifeline to the outside world; now people and goods moved via roadways, railways, and the small airport with thrice-weekly flights to Shanghai. I appeared to be the only visitor and had to wake a napping employee to buy a ticket and hire a guide. My guide appeared, looking as if she too had just woken from a nap.

  She gave her name as Zhang, and we began the tour at the throwing, painting, and glazing demonstration. As we entered the small courtyard, three ancient men roused themselves into action, like life-size coin-operated automatons. Moving with detached precision, one of them stuck a wooden staff into a nock on the edge of his throwing wheel and spun it up to speed. He slapped a lump of clay onto the wheel and expertly pulled a bowl from the clay in a few seconds and placed it on a plank to dry. The next man took a dried bowl, centered it on a wheel, gave it a spin, and painted circular designs on it. The last glazed a painted bowl not by spraying it but by dipping it into a barrel. In their bamboo work enclosures, they looked like prisoners.

  That would be the most interesting part of the tour, the rest of which consisted of visits to nonmoving displays of kilns and ceramic materials. Zhang recited her script and mostly thwarted my attempts to ascertain the authenticity or age of the things we looked at. There was only one structure, from the Ming dynasty, for which she could definitively state its era. Each area had its own gift shop, and Zhang made sure I browsed every one of them before signing a paper at the cashier to confirm that she had brought her visitor through.

  Our final stop was a temple manned by two bored-looking monks, who discreetly tucked their mobile phones into their robes when I entered. Even the temple had a gift shop, and Zhang passed me off to the young woman who worked there. She was more patient and friendlier than Zhang and explained to me that the temple was in honor of Tong Bin. Born in 1567, Tong Bin had been a precocious child and demonstrated an early aptitude for pottery. He quickly rose to become a master-level kiln master. Then the emperor demanded some especially large long gangs, or dragon pots, from the kiln. Tong Bin worked for fifteen years without producing a satisfactory long gang. Porcelain making at that time was far from precise, and the failure rate was high. The emperor grew impatient and dispatched a heavy-handed supervisor to Jingdezhen, where he declared that if the long gang could not be made, everyone involved with the kiln would be killed. There was only one long gang left to be fired, and when it was put into the kiln, Tong Bin jumped in with it. Because of his sacrifice, the firing was successful and the kiln was spared.

  I frequently heard this kind of martyr story in China. The creation of bloodred glaze was attributed to a farmer’s daughter who jumped into the kiln. A mountain retreat near Shanghai named Moganshan was named for a pair of star-crossed lovers, Mo Ye and Gan Jiang. Gan was tasked to make a sword for the emperor and continually failed until Mo sacrificed herself by jumping into the cauldron of metal, which allowed Gan to forge a sword that exceeded the emperor’s demands.

  “What is it with all these suicide stories in China?” I said.

  The woman laughed. “Yes, there are lots of these types of stories,” she said. “But it’s not just China. What about Romeo and Juliet?”

  ONE EVENING AT the Pottery Workshop’s coffee shop, perhaps the only place in town to get a decent espresso and a gathering place for the tiny expat population of English teachers and ceramists (often one and the same), I was introduced to the workshop’s director, ceramic artist Takeshi Yasuda, a stocky, balding man with a thin corona of gray hair. He wore baggy shorts, a white, sleeveless shirt, and technical sandals with curved rubber soles. His face was a composition of circles—a round forehead, round cheekbones, round jowls, and round tortoiseshell eyeglasses. Takeshi was married to an English ceramic artist and was on faculty at the Royal College of Art in London. He had not lived in Japan for so long that his niece told him that he spoke a very strange kind of Japanese.

  “Jingdezhen was not where porcelain was invented,” he told me as he made me an Italian-style cappuccino. “But all the innovations after that took place in Jingdezhen.”

  I sat at a glass-topped table displaying blue and white shards that Takeshi and others had picked up a
round the city and at the weekly antiques market, where I was told 99 percent of the intact pieces were falsely aged but the shards, which ranged in price from 20 to 300 RMB, were real. On the walls and shelves sat modern ceramics for sale, including some of Takeshi’s recent work, delicate pale green teaware with wabi sabi imperfections—an indentation here, a pinch there, an overlapping seam—formed from hands guided by a considered spontaneity. The thinness of the vessels interacted with gravity in the kiln, creating sagging bodies and warped lips that gave the impression that they were still spinning on the some invisible wheel, on the verge of deformation. They were so unlike the vast majority of wares in Jingdezhen’s stores, and very beautiful.

  While Takeshi prepared my coffee, I studied the ancient fragments of bowls, dishes, and vases in the table displays. Fired anywhere from fifty to five hundred years before and smashed for some imperfection, their curved surfaces remained glossy and held thumb-size flowers, animals, and figures in domestic scenes, some complete, some severed. I found them even more captivating than what their former wholes must have been. Takeshi set down my cup, and I experienced a flash of disorientation as the café dilated back into view. “In Chinese culture, porcelain was the most important cultural item and also the most exchanged item with other cultures,” he said.

  Throw a dart at a map of China, and it will probably land somewhere with an interesting porcelain history. The operative word here is history, for most of China’s famous porcelain cities had the connections to their glorious pasts broken long ago. The celebrated teapot clay in Yixing was mined out. Longquan, where celadon glaze was invented, managed to obtain UNESCO heritage status in 2009 but for “intangible” culture—every ancient kiln site had been destroyed. The giant-scale porcelain manufacturing in newly industrialized cities like Dehua relied on imported materials. Just one city’s kilns had never been extinguished: Jingdezhen’s, the buckle in China’s shard belt.

  The Chinese have two words for ceramics, taoci and ciqi, which approximate as “pottery” and “porcelain” respectively. Pottery making in China dates back to the Neolithic, and the Chinese achieved high-fired glazed ceramics in the late Shang dynasty. Porcelain, roughly defined as translucent white clay body composed of kaolin and china stone and fired above 1,200 degrees Celsius, probably first appeared during the Tang dynasty (618 to 907), though its originator remains unknown; for all of China’s firsts, the inventors or discoverers were seldom recorded.

  Porcelain soon became China’s most famous, most enduring invention. As early as the Tang dynasty, cargo ships loaded with porcelain sailed west for the Middle East, where middlemen would transfer the wares to Europe. For the Chinese, porcelain wasn’t just a sanitary material, dinnerware, or a hobby. Porcelain was as central to the Chinese identity as the Yangtze River, the bones to the Yangtze’s blood, and it was no accident that the material became eponymous with its country of origin. Porcelain touched every member of Chinese society, from peasants’ rice bowls to the imperial family’s massive collection. Porcelain formed the basis of China’s mythology and morality tales and fueled its economy, including the golden age of the Ming dynasty, which boasted the world’s largest economy. There was simply no Western analogue to the breadth and depth of porcelain’s infiltration of Chinese art, industry, and culture, though the automobile in America comes somewhat close.

  Jingdezhen was established in 1004 by the Song dynasty emperor Jingde as China’s original factory city, achieving what alchemists had labored after in vain for centuries: to turn dirt into gold. Far from the quaint, pristine old China of the Western imagination, each area of this bustling artistic and industrial hulk was dedicated to one part of the porcelain-making process, from sourcing clay to packaging finished goods, and everything was done by hand. Entire neighborhoods of craftsmen spent their working lives mixing one glaze, throwing one shape, or applying a single brushstroke. Even the porters, moving the pieces through the city on bamboo yokes or handcarts, specialized in the items they transported. This narrow division of highly skilled labor, along with the area’s unique terroir, allowed the Jingdezhen appellation to monopolize the market for the better part of a millennium.

  According to one enduring local myth, Jingdezhen was the birthplace of the term china. For centuries, the city was known as Chang Nan, or “South of the Chang River,” which provided its critical supply link; porcelain boats rode the Chang to Poyang Lake and Jiujiang, from which they accessed the Yangtze. Chang Nan manufactured the first Chinese porcelain for export, which had that name stamped on their bottoms. Western tongues approximated these wares’ place of origin as “china,” and the city’s name became synonymous with its product. Jingdezheners also liked to boast that the city escaped bombing during the Sino-Japanese War because Japanese pilots mistook the scores of tubular kiln chimneys for antiaircraft guns and figured it best to give the place a wide berth. (More likely the city wasn’t bombed because it served no strategic purpose.)

  The Song dynasty—vibrant, prosperous, and renowned for its culture and diverse artistic tastes—was also very corrupt. The state weakened to the point that it lost its northern territories to the Jin and had to regroup in the south. Eventually Kublai Khan—grandson of Genghis—and the Mongols conquered all of China and launched the Yuan dynasty. The subsequent destruction of other major kilns left Jingdezhen as the beneficiary. The Mongols didn’t have the same appreciation for the finest Song ceramics—the seafoam of ge celadon, the milky turquoise of ru ware, or the copper flambé of jun ware. White was the sacred color for the Mongols, and the closest producer of white ceramics was Jingdezhen.

  The Mongolian occupation was the most critical to Jingdezhen’s history. For centuries Chinese potters had battled gravity, trying to prevent a clay pot from collapsing during the firing process. The solution was finding the right material, and only high-quality porcelain stone—crushed into powder and reconstituted with enough water to make it malleable—could withstand the 1,250 degrees Celsius required to vitrify it into porcelain without deforming. Meanwhile the lowest melting point of glaze was just below 1,200 degrees Celsius, which gave potters a very narrow temperature range in which both a ceramic body and glaze would behave as desired.

  The discovery of massive kaolin deposits in a mountain near Jingdezhen during the Yuan dynasty changed everything. Mixing kaolin into clay raises its firing temperature (improving yield) while also allowing potters to conserve precious porcelain stone (improving production) because it can comprise half of the clay body and maintain its structural integrity even when eggshell thin. And it wasn’t just the presence of kaolin that made Jingdezhen’s clay unique; it was also the specific properties of that kaolin, right down to its molecular structure. While in Jingdezhen, I met a geologist from Montana who had traveled there to study its ceramic materials and who told me that both the size of its clay particles and its impurities could not have been more perfectly suited for making pottery. “The materials are absolutely unique here,” he said. “A gift from heaven.”

  Perhaps of most interest to the ruling Mongols, kaolin increased whiteness, and in 1278 Kublai Khan established a government bureau in nearby Fuliang, the county seat, to control the supply of materials. The idea behind that bureau—a government-supervised kiln in Jingdezhen—lasted until 1949, and if its records survived, they might hold information about the relative of mine who supposedly worked in Jingdezhen.

  By the Yuan dynasty, the network of foreign traders in China was well established. While Chinese tastes still ran toward subdued monochromes, Middle Eastern and Persian markets favored boldly painted porcelains. The Persians already knew that cobalt pigment could produce vibrant blues, but they could produce only low-quality ceramic bodies. The Yuan court, seeking to increase its export revenues, hit upon the idea of using Persian cobalt to decorate Chinese porcelain. The resulting snow-white porcelain painted in rich blues created a sensation, and Jingdezhen’s blue and white wares were shipped across the world.

  As the Yuan gave way
to the Ming dynasty in 1368, marking the restoration of native Chinese rule, Jingdezhen maintained its preeminence. The conquering Ming emperor Hongwu consolidated the legitimacy of his rule in part by ordering new vessels for the various ceremonies, rites, and sacrifices to gods and ancestors prescribed since high antiquity. But instead of gold, silver, or bronze, he insisted that all the sacrificial objects be made of porcelain. Subsequent Ming emperors established the official imperial kiln in Jingdezhen, where the quality and quantity of production were held to exacting standards; a production run of a thousand identical objects might yield just a handful of acceptable ones to send on to Beijing. Official wares began bearing the emperor’s reign mark—now one of the first things experts check to determine the age, authenticity, and value of antique porcelain.

  With the Manchu-led Qing dynasty came the apex of Chinese porcelain. The Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors took personal interests in porcelain production, partly out of a tradition of patronizing the arts and also partly to assimilate into Han Chinese culture. The result was an unparalleled explosion of high-quality techniques, glazes, and forms. Western influences also began to seep into porcelain. Missionaries had brought painted enamelware to China during the early Qing, and Kangxi fell so deeply in love with it that he all but forced missionaries—Guiseppe Castiglione being the most prominent—into imperial workshops to train and supervise painters. Jingdezhen continued to produce the porcelain bodies, which were decorated and finished in Beijing.