The White Road Read online

  But at this moment I don’t give a fig for emperors. This is Mount Kao-ling, my First White Hill. My hands are pale, almost white from the dust.

  ii

  To walk down this mountain is seven miles, longer by the forest track that follows the stream. As we come down from Mount Kao-ling we come to the river and a small town. Here the water is shallow and treacherous. It shifts its course, small banks appearing and disappearing day by day.

  Three water buffalo lie on a bank unmoving in the afternoon heat. There are swallows and a self-important clutch of ducks that launch themselves out into the eddies as we pass. Two elderly women are beating clothes kneeling on the stone shelf that runs by the riverbank. A man is rolling black melon seeds between finger and thumb, up to his mouth, crack and spit. A boy is gutting a fish. It is completely silent apart from the crack of teeth on seeds and the burble of the river; the first time I have heard silence in China.

  This was the dock where the kaolin clay from the mountain was loaded on to long bamboo rafts and steered down the river. The village feels derelict. There is mud in the alleyway and mosaicked across some of the floors of the open houses where families are eating rice, tattered posters of Mao presiding. The river has just flooded again and the damp hangs in the air. I ask when the dock was last used. A hundred years ago the mines closed and it has been in decline ever since. This alley was the main street with shopfronts that began at five feet to serve all the horsemen that came through. There were inns and teahouses for traders to do deals, but these have all gone.

  What is left is a run of sheds where kaolin was cleaned. No mortars are needed to pound the clay. It needs much less work to cleanse than petunse as ‘nature has done the greatest part of the work’. But it too must be crumbled into water, and mixed into a thin white slurry. This allows any sediment to be skimmed off, and through a similar process to that of petunse the liquid kaolin becomes cleaner and cleaner and can then be dried and made into white bricks. This would have happened here.

  From this jetty it is three dozen miles downstream to the city. It takes a day and a half after the spring rains, twice as long if you have to do the work with oars in the summer. The river used to be full of work, the artery along which flowed people and materials. Kiln bricks were made and fired on its banks and poled down on rafts, ‘a never-ending line’ of boats loaded with petunse and kaolin would come down from the hills. Père d’Entrecolles wrote of the congestion of ‘up to three rows of boats, one behind the other’ in Jingdezhen.

  On the opposite side of the river across from the city were the tombs. And here where the boats docked was a hamlet with yet more potteries and kilns. ‘All the riverbank by the ferry entrance is full of pottery – men unloading the raw clay boats and loading the finished porcelain boats’, writes the chronicler of the Tao Lu, of the noise and commotion.

  And where you unloaded your petunse or your kaolin the banks of the river were piles of debris. If you looked at your feet you would see that this embankment was made up of centuries of broken saggars, the debris of hundreds of kilns crunching densely below you. When these banks were swept away periodically by winter floods, they would be replaced by new shards.

  If you looked at the walls of the houses scrambling along the riverbank you would see that they, too, were made up of discarded porcelain, saggars, kiln bricks and tiles.

  If you looked into the river you would see glimpses of broken porcelain twenty feet below you.

  Porcelain shards on the riverbank, Jingdezhen, 1920

  iii

  Here in this city, the purest objects in the world are made. It is a city of skills and knowledge, of industrial sophistication beyond anything attempted elsewhere.

  There are twenty-three distinct categories to the creation of porcelain listed in the records: six categories of decorator, three of specialists in packing kilns, three for firing kilns, mould-makers, carpenters for crates, basketmakers, ash-men for cleaning away the residue after a kiln-firing, compounders for clay and grinders for oxides, experts in how to place pots inside saggars, others to place them inside a kiln, men who can balance a board of stacked cups over each shoulder and navigate a rainy street, full of people. And there are the dealers and merchants and scholars, officials and accountants, label writers, doorkeepers, guards for the imperial porcelain factory.

  This is the visible part of the city, tallied by the officials. There are a ‘mass of poor families … many young workers and weaker people … the blind and the crippled who spend their lives grinding pigments’ writes Père d’Entrecolles. On the margins are all those who are drawn to a city where work spills out from workshops into the streets, where there is a chance of rice after a day of sweeping or carrying or scraping bricks clean until your hands are raw. Here are those with burns from the kilns, the men breathless from years of the white dust of kaolin, the kids hoping to be taken on as apprentices.

  In 1712, my Jesuit father estimated a population of 18,000 families, possibly 100,000 people making a living from porcelain: ‘It is said that there are more than a million souls here, who consume each day more than 10,000 loads of rice, and more than a thousand pigs.’ Walking through this densely packed city with its narrow streets was like being in the middle of a carnival, he wrote in his letters, picking an image that the other Jesuit fathers would understand. Carnival is noise, and chaos, and it is a little scary.

  It works as an image; Jingdezhen is also a city of chancers.

  There is a small island in the middle of the river called Huang, the place where small hucksters spread out their stalls, ‘a large open space, in fact, and a market at the water’s edge … entirely occupied by stalls selling porcelain. Here the whole countryside can come and go freely to buy odds and ends no matter whether they are sets or single pieces.’

  Here there are peddlers with baskets who buy up odd vessels and hurry to the island, ‘they are known as “Island basket carriers”’. There are also:

  certain fellows in the Town, energetic hands at rubbing or patching porcelain vessels. They go from establishment to establishment … making offers for their odd pieces and collecting them. Those with mao-ts’ao – excrescences – they rub down and those with deficiencies they patch up. The colloquial name for them is ‘the shops that smooth the edges … Excessively bright porcelain pieces all have a hidden defect which has not yet caused their collapse. They are bought cheap … and strengthened with plaster. If they are dipped in hot water they break: they can only hold dry cold things. The popular name for them is ‘goods that have crossed the river’.

  It is too hot in summer and so cold in winter that the porcelain clay freezes and is useless. There are sudden and horrific fires when kilns go awry and destroy the densely packed houses in streets that are too narrow, ‘only a short time ago there was a fire that burned eight hundred homes’. And, ‘one hears on all sides the cries of porters trying to make a passage’. How you make your way through this city is complicated.

  iv

  It is eight in the evening when we get back from the hills, cross the river – encased in sheets of concrete – and stop in a packed restaurant and order beer. I’ve got my white brick and my lump of kaolin from the mountain and I put them both on the table and feel like a drug dealer.

  I’m ridiculously happy to have been inside my white hill.

  I get out my notebook to do some planning for the coming ten days. And I wander through the possibilities of trying to find some of the people whose skills make porcelain happen. My compass spins. I’m finally in the place where I can see how they use cobalt. I want to see how a kiln is unpacked. And as I’ve struggled for twenty-five years to make huge porcelain vessels it would be good to see how it should be done. And I want to find some really white pots to take home. Ten days feels scant.

  My driver and guide disagree about where I should go and who I should see, and the waitress and the man at the bar join in noisily, happily, and the owner tells me about his brother who makes porcelain figures of
the Buddha and someone from next door is summoned with a Ming Dynasty bowl with a beautiful peony which is for sale, limpid in blue, excessively bright. And there is more beer.

  Chapter four

  making and decorating and glazing and firing

  i

  Imagine coming down into Jingdezhen from the mountains, a city set out on a grid of streets, a swerve of river. You would have seen smoke and flame. A writer in 1576 described his approach: ‘I once travelled there as assistant administration commissioner and the noise of tens of thousands of pestles thundering in the ground and the heavens alight with the glare from the fires kept me awake all night.’

  The place has been called ‘the town of year-round thunder and lightning’.

  There is a tradition of writing poems when you take up a position or leave it: in Chinese literature there are innumerable melancholic verses about leaving your family, almost all of which are about wrapping your cloak more tightly about you as you contemplate your new life. ‘I come to fulfil the royal command to take charge of the potteries. A forest of fire can be seen all round like a railing’, wrote Chu Yüan-cho, pottery superintendent in the late fifteenth century in his ‘Lines on mounting the skyward-gazing pavilion and scanning the flames of the potteries from the ice-bound hall’:

  The red gates nearby connect a thousand peaks. The vermilion watchtowers afar rise from ten thousand streets. The dawn rising spreads a gay brocade about the rosy city. The sun springing to life soars in auspicious brilliance over a sea of purple. Within the four bounds all is blazing prosperity from dawn to eve. Who knows the emperor’s officers stands here in the cold alone?

  I’m nursing some horrible coffee. I have a headache this morning. The planning meeting in the restaurant last night went on and on. I didn’t buy the bowl. And though I’ve still got my kaolin I must have left my brick of petunse in the bar.

  There is no smoke here, the wood kilns were supplanted with coal and now there are mostly gas and electric kilns. The city is grey and wet. Yesterday’s exhilaration in the hills has also been supplanted. I have no idea of how to find what I am looking for. My list of questions and possibilities veers urgently from the mundane to the metaphysical. To the unreadable.

  Who do I ask? Or, as an earlier official wrote plangently, ‘Alas, I have to remain here for three years. How come I do not have a heart of iron? Just staying here my hair will go grey early.’

  ii

  I’m staying near the Sculpture Factory. There is a sort of hostel, clean and spartan, with a shared kitchen with notices about washing-up in most languages, and there are workshops which foreign artists can use. It is cheerful and noisy, and people show you pictures of their ceramics over coffee and tell you their plans and their discoveries. There is an Australian who came to a lecture I did fifteen years ago who catches me up with the pottery scene in Perth. It is very collegiate, which is rather hard work first thing. I think I’m slightly too old for collegiate, or out of practice, or just in need of proper coffee.

  The Sculpture Factory has gone, closed down, privatised under Deng Xiaoping in 1986, leaving its name to a sprawling twenty acres of city compound, with gates at the east and western sides. It is a warren of workshops of the mould-makers, throwers, sculptors, gilders, decorators and kiln men, interwoven with alleyways choked with detritus.

  There are a couple of four-storey factories from the 1960s, but most of the buildings are single-storey, brick with small windows, without glass for better ventilation. There is no apparent logic that I can find of who is where. The factories making Guanyins – the goddess of mercy – and small figures of Buddha, and the couple of women making wine cups and the family who specialise in porcelain cats are all tumbled together. Then there is a yard of teapot makers.

  One man has made good and his studio is freshly painted and empty. Others look derelict but are busy. How can you tell what is going on?

  There are private kilns scattered through the site, but the communal kilns are lower down, past the workshops. They are well marshalled as there is a complex traffic of work in and out, with names scribbled on blackboards near the entrance to keep track. You book a kiln or a few shelves for a particular day and have to be there at the correct time or lose your slot.

  By seven this morning there was a young woman sitting on a stool outside a cupboard-sized space, rolling very thin ropes of porcelain. Another nearby was creating petals the size of a baby’s thumbnail and lining them up on boards. The potters round the corner damp them slightly and press them on to vases in baroque, effusive tendrils. Someone is making them into water lilies, stranding them in small bowls and glazing them in bright, bright colours. They look really cheap.

  I double back. The flowers are the same as those on the Gaignières-Fonthill vase. She smiles and nods and I pick up one of the bowls and she could have made the daisies on that precious, freighted, faraway vase locked up in its scholarship in the museum in Dublin.

  And, actually, as I look more carefully at the flowers she has made today, I prefer hers.

  The packers have a small yard too, piled with straw and wood for packing cases. Carriers weave along, pushing their two-wheeled barrows of unglazed Buddhas, swan-necked vases and stacked bowls from one workshop to another. This is a profession, a good one, easing a cargo over the cobbles, shifting round corners. Making and decorating and glazing and firing are all separated and so need this careful transition from place to place. Each state they are moved in has a different vulnerability, a different potential for damage.

  Woodcut from the Tao Lu showing the preparation of porcelain moulds, 1815

  I want to find someone to make porcelain tiles for me. I have an idea for an exhibition that I’m curating for the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. I want to place old vessels from Jingdezhen on new tiles, three or four feet long. It could be beautiful – a sort of river of white through the empty galleries – and be suitably interrogative, question what is old and what is new, which is my brief from the museum. I’ve seen porcelain panels of this scale with washy landscapes painted on them, poems tumbling down one side, but I want mine plain. I keep asking and am getting nowhere.

  iii

  Jingdezhen is vast and I’m in the wrong bit.

  I finally get a lead. The factory I need is in a far part of town. It is over the rail tracks, guarded by two huge tutelary heaps of broken plaster moulds, ten feet across, and up an incline the other side. The train line is a kind of public space, a track and short cut, a place to play ball. It is also a useful place to dry your plaster moulds. There are three steam-hauled trains a day, forty or fifty trucks long and slow and chest-stretchingly loud. Loud enough for you to have time to yell to get the kids away and to move your washing or your moulds from the line. By the tracks is a run of single-storey buildings where they are angle-grinding steel tools for the turners. The mould-makers in fine white plaster dust are here too. And the slip-makers in white clay dust.

  A clutch of kids are playing a hopping game on the edge of the road. You close your eyes and have to catch the others on one leg.

  A boy is selling songbirds, five baskets on his back. They look like thrushes.

  There is an open door, a room with a table and five chairs. Porcelain panels lean against the wall, some decorated, some plain and ready to buy. Out the back is a covered shed, open to a courtyard, with stacks of wooden boards six feet high, barrels of porcelain and sacks of kaolin. There are three brothers, one at each end of a scaffolding pole and one in the middle, rolling a great slab of porcelain. It is heavy work and exacting, as you need even pressure between the steel and the clay, moving the weight across. And it is midday and very hot. Racks of drying tiles are ranged round the walls. The men work their way round the space, thinning the slabs hour after hour after hour, turning them to prevent them cracking.

  Timings and notes for each tile are chalked on the walls. And the floor is deep in white dust, inches thick, a map of footprints and bicycle-tyre tracks. The dust eddies under th
e workbenches and it clags your feet and catches in your throat. Their T-shirts are sheened in dust.

  I explain what I’d like and the fingers of the young woman in charge fly over the abacus as she notes the thickness of each tile, its length – a metre is no problem, would I like it longer?– the timescale. I produce a roll of notes. And she smiles. I worry about quantities. How are they going to get them back to England intact? This is my only chance to get these made so I sit down and double the order just in case. And then double it again.

  I come out and it is raining hard. I’ve been told that up the street is the family that makes eggshell porcelain. This is as complex a skill as any in the city. To make truly heavy porcelain, or to make porcelain that you can lift to the light and see your fingers through, are equally difficult. Eggshell porcelain is notorious. It cracks when nothing should crack. You throw a bowl and throw it thinly. Everything under control. Then you trim it thinly. Here you lose: pick a substantial percentage of the vessels you’ve made. To dry it, keep it away from heat from any particular direction, from draughts, from damp. When it decides to dry, place it on its rim on a special fired disc and put into your kiln. And fire it.

  Unload your bowls. Stack neatly all the cracked bowls to one side of your kiln shed and then carry the rest of them through your courtyard of dogs, chickens, clay, scooters, children and past the well, to your stock shelves in the house where more will crack for no reason at all.

  I find the family Xu. I’m given a bowl of faint straw-coloured tea and sit and watch and try and make out the divisions of labour in the family. A girl of three or four is chattering away with a puppy and there are three sons in the house, moulding and trimming, and the older daughter is cleaning glaze off very small stem cups. A hired line-painter is squatting, laying a cobalt edge with the fine point of a brush on a board of cups. He does eight a minute. And the mother is doing the washing and the cooking and there is shouting above the radio and the sound of the fans and the men.