On the white road
You wouldn’t think that a 400-page book on the history of ceramics would be much of a page turner. But one of the positives of lockdown and furlough has been the opportunity to read some of those books that have been in my pile for far too long. One was Edmund de Waal’s The White Road: A pilgrimage of sorts, which is a history and memoir rolled into one by this ceramic artist. It’s a hefty and beautifully white hardback, so I had been loath to lug it about and risk mucking it up. Perfect for weeks not going anywhere then!
I have written before about de Waal’s work, both literary and visual, and The Hare with the Amber Eyes is a book that continues to inspire me. The White Road uses the same easy tone and light-handed scholarship, tracing the history of ceramic as a material from Jingdezhen to Versailles and Dresden, to Plymouth, Etruria, Cornwall and Ayoree Mountain in the USA, with an important stop in Dachau. De Waal recounts his travels to each place, the physical experiences and material discoveries, alongside the craftsmen and scholars he has met. In each he collects a shard or small vessel of porcelain, building a collection in white that acts like the netsuke of The Hare in reverse, developed out of the story rather than framing it.
The history of ceramics is really fascinating. It is a global story of greed, innovation, beauty and suffering, in which European rulers and entrepreneurs vied to produce this prized Chinese material, such as Augustus the Strong who imprisoned Johann Friedrich Böttger for years to gain the secret of this ‘white gold’ in the eighteenth century, seemingly as difficult an alchemical project as making gold from lead. De Waal considers the long cultural power of porcelain in China – such as the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, built in the fifteenth century and considered a wonder of the world after the West discovered it in the seventeenth – through to the use of porcelain in Mao’s communist revolution. In Britain, this is the story of Quaker William Cookworthy working to make porcelain from British raw materials, and of the celebrity potter Josiah Wedgewood ultimately taking his work. It is also the story of white earth found in the land of the Cherokees in North America. In Dachau, it is the story of the Porzellan Manufaktur Allach beloved of Himmler, used to produce figurines glorifying the aspirations of National Socialism, and made through the talents and torments of concentration camp prisoners.
Throughout the account of this history, de Waal discusses his travels and research and weaves memories of his own career as a potter: his studies, his early studios, his hunt for the perfect porcelain, his work on exhibitions. It is a very personal story of hope, hard work and discovery, but also a deeply-compelling global history. De Waal shows beautifully how the history of a single material brings out the best and the worst in humanity.