i
The road keeps climbing. There are unexpected, ramshackle houses with a couple of paddy fields cut into the hillside, a pile of tyres by the door. It is poor here. The trees change and there is the first liquidambar amongst the pines and bamboo. There are fast cold streams that look like they have come straight out of ink paintings. We stop near a bridge over a waterfall and walk down a track towards some of the workings. It is overgrown, deeply shaded by the high trees.
Round a corner there is a cleft in the rock surface. There is a little spoil outside, a weathered heap of rock, like a half-hearted badger sett, scrappy with ferns and moss. The air coming from the mine is very, very cold.
The opening is just wide enough to clamber in, five feet high. I duck in, pause to allow my eyes to accustom themselves. The mine runs twenty feet back and then peters out in a rockfall. I run my hands over the surfaces. There is a sheen of damp. The walls are great cuts of white streaked with green. Some rock must have come down recently as there is cleaner, whiter rubble underfoot. I pick up a piece and it crumbles in my fingers. There is the glimmer of silver.
This is it, kaolin, my beginning. My guide calls, asking me if I’m alright in there.
These mines are now deserted. Once there would have been tunnels criss-crossing under this mountain, workers cutting into these soft white lodes, baskets of kaolin passed upwards and outwards towards the hillsides to be carried down. All mining is scary, but I wonder what it is like to feel this softness deeper underground, the give of porcelain clay in your hands.
In 1583, the eleventh year of the reign of the emperor Wanli, the director of the imperial factory Chang Huai-mei reported that the hillsides were so latticed that obtaining kaolin was almost impossible and that expensive extra labour was needed, that the whole business was impossible. You can hear his exasperation.
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.