i
I’m going home. I’m done.
I spent this morning interviewing two elderly men. They were both sculptors and both had created figures of Mao during the Cultural Revolution. It was an extraordinary few hours. I hope I can read my notes.
We are on the way to the airport. I hate to be late, really hate it, but my driver with his golden Mao is sanguine.
We stop in what might possibly be yet another research facility that the East Germans started and abandoned. I’m hopeful that there might be a plaque or a picture of First Secretary Walter Ulbricht. Name cards are swapped and amongst all the kitsch – vast porcelain vases with kittens – I catch sight of Mao’s imperial Tea Set.
This is a great moment for me.
The Tea Set – it demands capitals – consists of an ovoid teapot, teacups on saucers, a sugar bowl, a coffee pot and a wine ewer and eight wine cups, some cake plates and a cake stand. All in bright, radiant, good morning revolutionary-white with candy-pink sprays of peach blossom across each one. It is New Dawn, Great Leap Forward Porcelain, and it is unaffectedly suburban. That is, it doesn’t look cheap, it looks Proper.
It looks like how the best china should look, something to put into a glass cabinet and bring out for guests. Nixon perhaps. Cup of tea, Mr President? A cake? Milk?
The story is this. Mao liked presents, like every emperor before him. And Jingdezhen, having offered tributes in the form of many hundreds of thousands of Mao busts, ceramic badges and plates with happy workers wending their way home from the steel mills, had yet to receive a specific request or commission from the Great Leader. So in the late 1960s the Jiangxi party started to think about what would be appropriate. A new seam of clay of startling purity had been discovered in Fuzhou in Jiangxi Province and this was mined, refined and prepared. Instructions were issued to the Jiangxi provincial party committee for the creation of ‘new wares’.
Nothing was more important; the mission was assigned the number 7,501. It was Year Zero One for Jingdezhen.
The records tremble with anxiety. ‘The organisation and management of the project is extremely tight. All personnel involved in the project have had strict political examination.’ Checkpoints were set up.
Very quickly there was panic. The ten tons of raw materials were found to be insufficient and Red Guards were transferred to the project to speed up the refining. No one was allowed to rest and home leave was cancelled. Technical problems were judged as indicative of insufficient regard for the Leader. This is a crime punishable with death.
Then came the agonising decision about what they could make. Objects that were neither historicist (see what we have lost), nor scholarly (do you know what this unusual glaze is Comrade?). The porcelain could not be overtly decorative either. This was a revolution, so no vases and no goldfish bowls.
So it had to be useful and skilful and new: a tea set.
Twenty-two kilns were fired over the next six months and two sets of 138 pieces were finally delivered to Mao’s compound in Beijing in early September 1975. He approved.
Mao died a year later. And the special seam of clay was sealed up for ever.
Which makes me happy. I’m finally on my way to the airport and I’ve seen his Tea Set at last. It is perfect imperial porcelain from Jingdezhen. And I smile over the sealing up of the seam of kaolin, an action that was historicist and scholarly, and utterly lacking in utilitarian purpose.
ii
On the plane back to Shanghai there is so much porcelain carried on by the passengers – in brocade boxes and wrapped in newspaper in plastic bags – that the overhead lockers are filled and the lavatory is requisitioned to store it.
I sit next to a charming man who works for the Pakistani air force who is on a six-week tour of military facilities. Jingdezhen makes helicopters, he tells me. He has bought a model for his five-year-old son, who he misses terribly, and shows me photographs of the boy clowning around for his father in bright sunshine. Then I realise why dozens of model AC313 helicopters have also been brought on board.
I’d missed the helicopter side to the city. He’d missed the porcelain.