The Story of Porcelain

By Dr. Tea, Tea Expert

New Discovery:

Originally it was thought Porcelain or China as we refer to it, was discovered during the Tang Dynasty (618- 907AD) however recent excavations in a large ancient kiln site in southeast China's Jiangxi Province, dating back to the middle-to-late period of the Shang Dynasty (1600-1100 BC), has produced evidence with an effect featuring "rewriting the history of chinaware."

Results obtained following a two-month excavation near the end of last year in Jiaoshan kiln site of about 30,000 square meters revealed that primitive chinaware appeared some 1,000 years earlier than thought.

The site approximates some 400 square meters turned out about 10 kilns of the types of clevis-shaped kilns and dragon kilns.

A clevis kiln represents the style of china-making popular in the north, while dragon kilns were more common in the southern part of the country.

It was generally accepted that clevis-shaped kilns were introduced into the south as early as in the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127 AD). However, clevis kilns found this time were some 3,300 years ago.

Chinaware has evolved from vitreous pottery, primitive chinaware, celadon wares and finally to ripe china.

It is the first time that Shang-dynasty clevis-shaped kilns and dragon kilns were found simultaneously, said Yu Jiadong with the Archaeological Research Institute of Jiangxi Province.

Some 150 chinaware pieces were recovered and repaired, mostly three-foot vessels.

Names of Porcelain in Europe:

Porcelain was generally named for its supposed place of origin and was known as majolica in Italy, faience in France, Delft in Holland.

Porcelain in Europe:

Second only to tea, perhaps the most important contribution China made to European life was "china" itself ­ the hard translucent glazed pottery the Chinese had invented under the Tang dynasty and which we also know as porcelain.

It took a considerable amount of time for the Europeans to discover the secrets of making porcelain, even though the Chinese have been making the product for centuries.

None of the European earthenware could ever stand up to boiling water without dissolving and nowhere in Europe was it understood how to heat a kiln to the fourteen hundred degrees or so required to vitrify clay and make it impervious to liquids, boiling or not. Most of the problem was uncovering the actual material used to make the porcelain which is even further complicated because the composition of porcelain is highly variable, but china clay, comprising mainly or in part the mineral kaolinite which is often a significant component. Other materials mixed with china clay to make porcelain clay have included feldspar, ball-clay, glass, bone ash, steatite, quartz, petuntse and alabaster.

Even so wise a man as Sir Francis Bacon could only view porcelain as a kind of plaster which, after a long lapse of time buried in the earth, "congealed and glazed itself into that fine substance." Other writers speculated it was made from lobster shell or eggs pounded into dust.

Porcelain in time became the only Chinese import to rival tea in popularity. The wealthy collected it on a grand scale and even middle class people became so carried away that Daniel Defoe could complain of china "on every chimney-piece, to the tops of ceilings, tit it became a grievance."

Such abundance half the world away from its place of manufacture was due to its use as ships' ballast. The China trade came to rest on two water-sensitive, high-value commodities: silk and tea. These had to be carried in the middle of the ship to prevent water damage, but to trim the ship and make her sail properly, about half the cargo's weight (not volume) was needed below the waterline in the bilges. Very roughly, a quarter of all tea imported had to be matched by ballast and from the ships' records available, it appears that about a quarter of all ballast was porcelain. Over the course of the 1700s England probably imported twenty-four thousand tons of porcelain while a roughly equal amount would have been imported into Europe and the American colonies.

To keep up with this demand, Jingdezhen, China's main porcelain-making center since the Song dynasty, as early as 1712 needed to keep three thousand kilns fired day and night.

The prices fell to ridiculously low levels-seven pounds seven shillings in 1730 for a tea service for 200 people, each piece ornamented with the crest of the ambassador who ordered it; teapots, five thousand of them in 1732, imported at under two pence each. Even if we multiply these prices by one hundred to approximate today's value, it is incredibly cheap cost for porcelain of this quality.

Before European-made wares came into general use around 1800, the English and European middle classes enjoyed their tea and meals from the finest quality chinaware ever used by any but very wealthy people, a quality of life for which the tea trade was directly responsible.

For years before the advent of tea it had been the dream of all European potters to produce china themselves. Britain's Elers brothers mastered stoneware, but their efforts to reproduce china proved unavailing, and so did the efforts of all the other first-rate potters in Europe.

The potters of St. Cloud in France developed a substitute now known as soft-paste porcelain, but nobody came near approximating the real thing until an apothecary's apprentice named Johann - Friederich Bottger bumbled onto the scene.

When he was nineteen, Bottger met the mysterious alchemist Lascaris in Berlin and received a present of some two ounces of transmutation powder from him. As Lascarls no doubt intended, Bottger's couldn't resist showing off the powder's powers. Unfortunately, he also claimed to have made it himself with the predictable result that he soon had all the crowned heads of Germany in his pursuit.

He finally reached safety, so he thought, in Dresden, under the protection of August 11, "the Strong," Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. But with extravagant gifts and riotous living, his stock of powder was exhausted rather sooner than later and his "protector" proved not to be the disinterested well-wisher he had seemed. Poor Bottger found himself confined in the castle of Konigstein where he was given a laboratory for his researches and a clear understanding of the fate reserved for him should he fall.

He finally convinced his jailer, a certain Count Tschirnhaus, that he was not an Adept in the spagyric arts but merely a demonstrator. The count proposed that in that case he should put the laboratory to use in quest of the secret of making china, since next to gold and power, collecting Japanese and Chinese porcelains was Augustus's ruling passion. (He had filled a palace with his collection-some twenty thousand pieces and still growing-by the time of his death.)

Fortunately for the prisoner-researcher, Saxony abounds with the two main ingredients for the manufacture of porcelain-china clay or kaolin and the so-called china stone, a type of rock made up mostly of silica and alumina that serves as a flux and gives the ware its translucency.

Bottger first produced stoneware and then, after numerous false starts, finally obtained a hard-paste red porcelain in 1703. The kiln had been kept burning for five days and five nights and in anticipation of success his royal patron had been invited to see it opened. It is reported that the first product Bottger took out and presented to Augustus was a fine red teapot. The long-sought secret had been discovered at last and after a few more years Bottger managed to come up with genuine hard-paste white porcelain.

Completely restored to favor, the young man admitted he had never possessed the secret of transmutation; he was formally forgiven and promptly appointed director of Europe's first china factory. It was established near Dresden in a little village called Meissen and proved to be worth almost as much to Augustus as the Philosopher's Stone would have been. Soon after full production got underway in 1713, the export market for Meissen figurines alone ran into the millions.

In a letter of 1746, Horace Walpole grumbled about the new fashion in table decoration at the banquets of the English nobility: "Jellies, biscuits, sugar, plums, and cream have long since given way to harlequins, gondoliers, Turks, Chinese, and shepherdesses of Saxon China." Teapots and teacups were also produced in ever increasing quantities.

Industrial espionage spread the secret of porcelain manufacture beyond the Germanies during the 1740s, and in 1751 fifteen English entrepreneurs Joined together to found the Worchester Royal Porcelain Works. To the chagrin of every prince and duke in France lavishing patronage on a little porcelain works of his own, the King's beloved Madame De Pompadour decided to bestow hers on a little factory located near Versailles at Sevres. Louis XV bought it to please her in 1759 and, just to make sure it would prosper, ordered the royal chinaware made there. When in need of money the king sometimes forced the courtiers at Versailles to buy quantities of Sevres at extortionate prices.

The English porcelain firms of the eighteenth century kept experimenting with the formulae filched from the Continent and it would be interesting indeed to know how Mr. J. Spode first hit upon the idea of using the ingredient that distinguishes English from all other porcelains-the ashes of burned bones. And from the beginning, the mainstay of the production at Worchester, Chelsea, Spode, Limoges, and all the other centers of china making in Europe was the tea equipage.

Renoir Started as a Porcelain Painter

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 - 1919) was a hugely prolific artist, completing some 6000 paintings during his career. Born in Limoges, France on February 25, 1841 his father Leonard was a tailor and mother Marguerite a seamstress. Renoir, the youngest child, had a happy childhood in Paris. Interestingly the Renoir family's first home in Paris was an apartment in the Louvre which was then still a royal palace.

Renoir spent five years as a porcelain painter. His work paid him well and earned a him the nick-name Mr Rubens for his skilled brushwork as he copied the works of Boucher.

When the porcelain factory was automated Renoir's position became obsolete and he spent a year painting murals in cafes before joining the art school of Charles Gleyre in 1862.

Boucher, François (1703-1770), French painter, noted for his pastoral and mythological scenes, whose work embodies the frivolity and sensuousness of the rococo style.

Boucher's delicate, lighthearted depictions of classical divinities and well-dressed French shepherdesses delighted the public, who considered him the most fashionable painter of his day. Examples of his work are the paintings Triumph of Venus (1740, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) and Nude Lying on a Sofa (1752, Alte Pinakothek, Munich) and the tapestry series Loves of the Gods (1744). Boucher's sentimental, facile style was too widely imitated and fell out of favor during the rise of neoclassicism. He died in Paris on May 30, 1770.

by Dr. Tea (tm), Tea Expert