The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

by Huan Hsu

  At its peak in the Qing dynasty, Jingdezhen hummed with densely packed houses, crowded streets, and temples built by merchants and boatsmen seeking favor with the gods. Its one million inhabitants (about the same number as today) quarried deep into the surrounding hills for porcelain stone and clear-cut the forests to feed the thousands of kilns burning around the clock. Jingdezhen’s chimneys not only defined its skyline, the same way church towers rose above the rooftops in European cities, but also served as its nuclei. The chimneys were why transporters hauled materials over great distances from the forested hills into the workshops, and why the clay passed through a horde of processors, throwers, trimmers, carvers, painters, glazers, retouchers, and others on its way to the kiln (the saying in Jingdezhen was that a dozen hands touched each piece from start to finish), where it vitrified under the watchful eye of the kiln master, perhaps the most alchemical of the ceramic specialists. Once the kiln was packed and sealed, it consumed a nonstop diet of pine billets for more than a week to reach temperature, which the kiln master, without the benefit of thermometers, determined by watching the color of the flames, observing the luminosity of the saggers (the clay containers in which the ceramics were fired), and spitting on the bricks. It took four days for the kiln to cool, after which workers still had to wrap their hands and bodies in protective layers of wet cloth to extract the saggers, and opened them to see if the firing had been successful.

  When the kilns turned from wood to coal, their chimneys—still the tallest structures in town—emitted a foot’s worth of soot annually. The eighteenth-century French Jesuit priest François Xavier d’Entrecolles (one of many missionaries who traveled to China to uncover its porcelain secrets) wrote that at night “one thinks that the whole city is on fire, or that it is one large furnace with many vent holes.”

  Over the centuries Jingdezhen’s kilns developed glaze that could show mixed colors and graduations within the paint. They invented twice-fired doucai colored wares and polychrome enameled wucai pieces. Lead arsenic created pink, which allowed for the depiction of peaches, an important achievement as the peach tree was soaked with historical and cultural significance. “All these inventions are extraordinary inventions,” Takeshi said. “And all these decoration and material technologies were done here in Jingdezhen. It’s the most amazing thing.”

  While Jingdezhen rose, European scientists remained baffled over how to produce porcelain. Some believed that it was formed when falling stars struck the earth. Others theorized it was made of crushed eggshells or a special fish paste left to ripen underground for one hundred years. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans journeyed to China to discover porcelain’s arcanum, but no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t reproduce the translucent material that was “white as jade, thin as paper, bright as a mirror, with the sound of a music stone [when struck].” Until the eighteenth century, the disparity between the Chinese and Western ceramic industries was as stark as that between China and the West in the centuries that followed.

  The savior came in an unexpected form. Johann Böttger was a Saxon charlatan who claimed to have successfully produced gold from base metals. His boasting earned him an audience with Frederick I, who demanded he make good on his claims. Böttger escaped, only to be “rescued” by the king of Saxony, August the Strong. August believed Böttger could solve his treasury’s woes and placed him under protective custody until he produced gold. In Dresden, Böttger faked his way through alchemical procedures until a sympathetic court scientist suggested he search for a way to produce the next best thing to gold: porcelain. He began experimenting with different clays and, because he wasn’t completely unskilled, designed a kiln that could reach 1,300 degrees Celsius. Judging by the sign he hung outside his workshop, which read, “God, our creator, has turned a gold maker into a potter,” he worked grudgingly.

  In 1708 Böttger happened to receive a shipment of hair powder, which he assayed as both a natural substance and having an unusual weight. It was kaolin. Following the successful firing of porcelain, Böttger’s laboratory relocated to Meissen in 1709, and Meissen porcelain hit the market in 1713, a harbinger for the rise of companies like Wedgwood and the end of China’s prosperity.

  During the late Qing, as subsequent emperors lost interest in porcelain or became too busy with trying to hold their empire together, the kilns were entrusted to local authorities, and imperial styles declined. Except for brief periods of renewed interest, such as the garishly colored sets of tableware and boxes that Cixi commissioned for her birthdays in 1884, 1894, and 1904 during her reign of excess, the imperial kilns faded.

  In 1949 the new Communist government began consolidating Jingdezhen’s kilns into ten nationalized factories, each specializing in a certain type of ceramics: the Shi Da Ci Chang, or Ten Great Factories. One made blue and white, one made on-glaze painted pieces, one made sculptures, one made oversize pieces, and so on. The factories were overemployed, saddled with bureaucracy, and wages were modest, but the jobs were secure and everyone “ate from the big bowl of rice.”

  The Ten Great Factories all failed after privatization in the 1990s, destroying the local economy and hollowing out the company town’s core industry. Employees were let go or forced to take early retirements. (One local told me some factory retirees received a monthly pension of 160 RMB, about twenty dollars.) Some of the factories were too bankrupt to pay owed wages and gave porcelain as severance. But as they said in Jingdezhen, you can’t eat porcelain, and downtown filled with people selling surplus porcelain from handcarts. The empty factories fell into disrepair, their inventory piled outside and overtaken by vegetation. A popular site for Western artists to visit was a defunct plate factory, with seemingly endless stacks of unwanted plates left behind the buildings, perhaps all the more remarkable that they remained undisturbed in a country where nearly everything was scavenged. Porcelain manufacturing has relocated to the coast, where it relies on machines and has become notorious for lacking creativity, quality, and respect for intellectual property. Jingdezhen’s factories lie in ruins, the once-great porcelain industry now consisting of a fragmented assortment of individual workshops and kilns manned by aging former factory employees who continue the ancient handcrafted traditions both out of stubbornness and for lack of a better alternative.

  Meanwhile the political cadres posted in Jingdezhen often come from elsewhere, with their eyes on the next rung on the party ladder, so they aren’t particularly interested in Jingdezhen’s porcelain history or its affairs in general. The development that occurred in Jingdezhen—the new roads, the Walmart, and the wrapping of streetlights in blue and white porcelain—was funded by the central government, and the local government seems preoccupied with grandiose projects, such as building oversize (and vacant) apartment complexes, often ruining ancient kiln sites in the process, or establishing heavy industry like the Sikorsky helicopter plant or Suzuki factory. Huge billboards both advertise and veil the construction taking place behind them, projects with names like “Regal Mansions” and “Upper East Side JDZ,” and advertising copy such as “harmonious imitating nature’s godliness symbolism.” Plenty of these projects never finish once the government and developer have made their money, leaving the city dotted with cavernous multistory concrete shells.

  Or the local government constructs boondoggles like the China Ceramic Museum. Reclining atop a mountain miles from any historically significant ceramics site and served by a 200-foot-wide traffic artery at least 150 feet wider than necessary, the museum was initiated as a showpiece for former president Jiang Zemin’s 2004 visit to his ancestral home in northern Jiangxi. But once Jiang came and went, work on the museum essentially stopped, leaving an impressive glass and steel facade and little else. The museum’s vast window frames remain empty, water damage has created long fissures in the walls, and rusting, peeling trusses arch overhead. The concrete floors are still tracked with cemented footprints and studded with jagged ends of rebar. In some wings, sta
ircases descend into dirt and weeds. The only area of the museum that seems complete is the hall dedicated to photographs and paraphernalia commemorating Jiang Zemin’s visit. The museum still has no expected opening date, no plan, no curatorial team, and not a single item in its collection. “It’s very Chinese,” Takeshi said. “They think you can build anything, even culture.”

  That was the Jingdezhen that Takeshi and the Pottery Workshop were fighting against. When he was younger, Takeshi had spent a decade in Mashiko, a Japanese ceramics village, where he watched all the old master craftsmen disappear. While in England, he had seen the extinction of its country potters. The same was happening in Jingdezhen, he said. “You can see this town is going to change very quickly in the next ten to twenty years, unless these trained people in ceramics change their products to what makes sense in modern society,” he said. “That’s how Jingdezhen survived a thousand years. The most important tradition is that the industry changes with society. I’m not a museum guy. That’s not how to preserve tradition. That’s how I see traditions die.”

  For now, Jingdezheners can still claim that the city’s kilns have never been snuffed out. While other porcelain cities came and went, Jingdezhen’s kilns fired through dynastic upheavals, wars, and disastrous national policies, leaving behind a stories-deep layer of topsoil so saturated with old kilns and shards that it glitters.

  UNTIL I SAW those shards in the Pottery Workshop’s coffee shop, I had seen no indication of such abundance. The Jingdezhen I had experienced appeared paved over and far removed from its ancient past. But the shards ignited a longtime impulse, the same one that compelled me to spend hours sifting through my Legos for the right piece, to steal baseball cards, to interview twice as many people as I needed to for the perfect nugget of information, to scour classified ads for classic tennis racquets. And the shards offered the chance to collect not only old, real Chinese things but also objects that could have come directly from my great-great-grandfather’s time and beyond. The attraction was so powerful that I never questioned my desire.

  I asked Takeshi where I could find some for myself. Everywhere, he said. Historically important kiln sites were still being discovered all the time. He had once gone to visit a site outside of the city, where a road was being built atop a huge Song-era kiln. “It was ten meters deep, freshly dug, and some pots looked like they were put there that day,” he said. “Amazing! There were more pots and saggers than soil, and it was all nine hundred years old! This was during the dragon kiln period, so every firing had tons of discarded material.”

  Even Jingdezhen’s waterways were plaqued with shards, since anything broken during transit or loading was summarily tossed overboard. Most residents above a certain age could remember when the Chang River ran so clean, they could read the characters on the shards lining its bottom, in such quantities that they had to wear shoes when swimming to protect their feet from getting cut.

  But like any beginner, I still couldn’t see what I sought, until one evening before I returned to Shanghai. Just beyond the layer of new development ringing People’s Square, I happened upon a construction site where workers had dug a long trench about eight feet deep through a historic neighborhood. An equally long pile of earth stretched along the trench. The sun had settled at a languid position in the sky, dimming its heat, and residents had emerged from their shady refuges. Dozens of men, women, and children stood in the ditches, chipping away at the walls with hand tools. Others clutched old rice sacks and walked meandering search patterns over the removed soil. I went over to see what they were doing and realized that the soil was studded with blue and white shards, and the walls of the trench were composed of layer upon layer of shard deposits.

  Once I saw these first shards in situ, I began seeing them everywhere, as clear as stars in a night sky. They seemed to multiply before me, a carpet of blue and white fragments stretching from my feet to the horizon.

  I walked over to the trench and picked up a few blue and white fragments. It was technically illegal to dig for porcelain shards, but the city supposedly looked the other way when it came to combing through the disturbed soil of construction sites. And there was no shortage of construction in town. Entire neighborhoods of kilns and houses, some of which dated back a thousand years to the Song dynasty, had been clear-cut for a new shopping center, apartment complexes, and a five-star “luxury” hotel. (Every time one of these was built in China, a Communist received his wings.) Takeshi had told me that an archaeological team might make a survey of a potentially important site, but most of the time they couldn’t be bothered because there were just too many ancient kilns to inspect them all. But what was bad for preservation was great for shard hunting. Every morning before the machinery started up, people flocked to the construction sites with trowels and picks, and they came back in the evenings after the workers knocked off.

  A woman in dirty clothes appeared from the other side of the pile, holding a sack and a handpick. “Are you looking for shards?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you sell them?”

  “Are you interested in buying?” she asked.

  “I might be.”

  The woman made a quick scan of the area and squatted down to show me what she had picked. “Well, take a look, then,” she said, showing me fragments of what she claimed were Ming dynasty bowls. They were so lustrous, and the painted blue on them so sharp, that I had trouble believing they were three hundred years old.

  “Are you sure these aren’t Republican?” I said.

  “Look at the glaze,” she said. “Look at how much higher quality it is. That one you’re holding, that’s Republican.”

  I tossed away my shard. She seemed to know what she was doing, so I asked if she could take me around to look for shards. “No, I don’t have the time,” she said, and moved away.

  IT TOOK ONLY a few days for me to see that, for all its rudeness, Jingdezhen was one of the most vibrant, dynamic, and unique places in China, as well as one of its most threatened. So many lines of Chinese history intersected here, including my own, and those lines remained intact—for the moment. I returned to Shanghai still wanting to know if San Yi Po’s father, Ting Geng, had really served as the xian zhang, or county commissioner, of Jingdezhen. And how he had acquired porcelain for my great-great-grandfather. And I wanted shards. But Jingdezhen’s tension between past, present, and future was so urgent and intoxicating—and real—that instead of just returning for another short trip, I decided I needed to move there.

  I had to extract myself from Shanghai. Once I used up my vacation days at work, I applied for a leave of absence. Richard didn’t object; the tenor of so many family interactions depended on felicitous timing. Whether it was my being Richard’s nephew, or how little I would be missed, I was approved for my leave. I returned to Jingdezhen in October.

  To help me find an apartment, Jacinta, from the Pottery Workshop, introduced me to her friend Maggie Chen, a Japanese major at the JCI and Jingdezhen native. There wasn’t much housing to choose from—returning JCI students had snapped up all the cheap apartments close to campus. I thought my requirements were modest, a Western toilet and a shower, but many Jingdezhen residents only had running water for a few hours during the day, filling buckets every morning to last them the day, and Western toilets were rare. Still, Maggie didn’t stop trying, and I couldn’t believe how determined she was to help. She shook off my gratitude. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ve got time, so I’m happy to help, and who knows, maybe you can help me down the road. Besides, you’re Chinese. If you were a laowai, I probably wouldn’t have agreed.”

  After about a week, Maggie found an apartment for me, on the top floor of a five-story building near the JCI. The only catch was the landlord, Ms. Zhang, a friend of her mother’s. Ms. Zhang had once been rich, owning several apartments in Jingdezhen, until some tenants skipped town with a lot of her money. Then her husband ran off with another woman, leaving her to raise their daughter alo
ne. Those experiences had left Ms. Zhang a paranoid, insistent middle-aged woman with a face tensed in a permanent grimace. She was luosuo in its purest, pain-in-the-ass sense.

  Most of the apartment’s lightbulbs had burned out, but when Maggie asked if she would replace them, Ms. Zhang said that it wasn’t convenient for her to do so. “This is plenty of light,” Ms. Zhang said. “You’re not going to do anything in this living room except sit around anyway. What do you need so much light for at night? Just go to sleep.”

  We got nowhere, but I took the apartment. I soon discovered that the toilet tank leaked and the hot water from the shower nozzle ran at a trickle. A handyman told me there was nothing he could do, so I took cold showers for a while and, when the nights turned chilly, knelt in the tub with a bucket and a kettle of boiled water. When I brought it up with Ms. Zhang, she said, “The shower is fine. How much are you going to bathe in the winter anyway?”

  There was nothing I could say about the apartment that would make Ms. Zhang concede anything was wrong. China is too often a country of chabuduo, literally “not far off” and essentially “good enough.” “You ordered a cup, right? Well, here’s a cup,” a potter might say. “But it’s not the cup I ordered,” the customer might protest. “Ach!” the potter replies with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Chabuduo.” The reaction to broken things or systems isn’t to repair or replace them but to modify one’s expectations. In some ways, this is a hallmark of Chinese adaptability, but I just saw parsimony and laziness. Even Maggie’s advice when I complained about Ms. Zhang’s luosuo-ness belied the very mentality that I couldn’t stand. “You have to get used to it,” she said. “She’s the same age as your mother, probably, so you better learn how to take it.”