Pousa is a singularly depressing guardian angel for us potters. But an appropriate one as he brings money and failure up really close and personal.
I’m here in a semi-official role. My curation of the exhibition has been misinterpreted into my being A Curator of a Western Museum: Exhibition of Jingdezhen Porcelain. Somehow I’ve become an opportunity to be seized.
Once this is known, I’m upgraded. I get a driver with a golden Mao on his dashboard, a driver who doesn’t spit. This morning I have an interpreter, an interpreter’s shadow, a man taking a video, the Cultural Bureau chief, someone from the university. I find myself asking someone if they’ve come far, like a parodic diplomat. ‘Porcelain’, I offer over toasts of Maotai, the pungent and powerful Chinese vodka, at lunch, ‘is cultural glue.’ I have no idea why I say this and I’m not sure how this is being translated and the bewilderment lasts another round of clinked cups until we agree that if everyone came here, to this city and saw this, then we would have understanding, as porcelain is the road of peace.
Our little motorcade drives slowly around the campus of the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute. It is the biggest porcelain campus in the world, they confide to me. It is completely empty as it’s the summer holidays, so it feels like the setting for a dystopian movie. Or a horror film. It’s been a long day.
Over another meal, shortly after the first meal, I’m shown the Gift. It is the design for the metre-high porcelain vase to be given to the Queen of England to celebrate her diamond jubilee. It is to be yellow, in the shape of a close-fitting robe with six red roses scattered over it, supported on a frieze of ancient Chinese characters that read something symbolic of longevity.
It is tact or politeness that makes me start to say that I admire its skill, but then I run out of steam on this sentence. And the main man, a man with a business card that actually folds out to list in tiny characters the manifoldness of his public achievements, knows I’m lying.
I’m lying because skill is so important because it belongs to someone and this man in his leather jacket is going to screw the skills of so many people to get this Gift done, and fold the credit into the shiny purple lining of his shiny black jacket. Just as he did to get the Hong Kong Gift made. This was to celebrate the return of Hong Kong from being a British territory to China in 1997. A thin porcelain plaque 1.997 metres square had to be made, glazed and painted ‘by me’. This was something that was on the edge of impossibility. The shrinkage could be calculated exactly and the clay could be rolled perfectly – I’ve seen it done by three men and a scaffolding pole in a backstreet workshop in the city – but if it was fired flat on a huge kiln shelf then it would crack. So massive resources were ‘made available’ and a way of firing the plaque on its side was discovered.
This is how it is always done here. How it always was done.
In this new China there is money, an aquifer of cash just below the surface of the city. You sink your borehole here and it is dry, but you try again there and it gushes and gushes. It could be big pots. Or it could be an exhibition in a museum abroad or a new role in a development corporation. It could be that you become president of the local chamber of porcelain manufacturers, a prefectural superintendent, but what it means is that someone now owes you and that you can now afford to build yourself a house with an atrium like a museum in the Midwest, and you are covering the facade with shards.
Somewhere in this long day of meetings and toasts and presentations I feel I’ve done something or said something and now I owe them, and will be folded, carefully, into obligation.