The White Road: Journey into an Obsession
In tracing the path of his family’s collection of miniature Japanese ivory carvings across multiple generations and countries, Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes tapped into a universal story of belonging, possession, and loss. How to follow such a remarkable achievement? The White Road explores the history of porcelain and both the world’s and de Waal’s obsession with “this white gold, the cause of bankruptcy of princes, of Porzellankrankheit — porcelain sickness.” In sixty-six short chapters, he again melds personal memoir with cultural and political history. Like Mark Kurlansky’s Salt — though on a far more personal level — The White Road finds in a sparkling white substance a revealing portal into history.
But here’s another thing about The White Road: To my astonishment, like de Waal’s previous book, it hits on a mostly unexamined backdrop to my childhood. I grew up in a household filled not only with my father’s ever-evolving netsuke collection but with so many sets of china we could easily dine off different dishes for days on end. A beautifully set table was important to my mother, and her appetite for Wedgwood, Spode, and Minton was stoked during our years living in London in the late 1960s and 1970s. I have inherited some of this fine china, along with her predilection for varying the table decor for each meal. Yet it occurred to me as I embarked on The White Road that I know precious little about porcelain. And I suspect I am not alone in this.
The White Road: Journey into an Obsession
Hardcover $27.00
The White Road: Journey into an Obsession
Hardcover $27.00
De Waal is a lively guide. He discovered his passion for “pots,” as he calls them, at the ridiculously young age of five. What followed, he writes, is “forty-plus years of sitting, slightly hunched with a moving wheel and a moving piece of clay trying to still a small part of the world, make an inside space.” Over the decades, he worked his way from earthenware to stoneware to porcelain. He estimates that he has thrown tens of thousands of pots, the vast majority of which are glazed in shades of white or the lightest celadons, greys, and creams. White, he writes, “is a way of starting again. It is not about good taste . . . making porcelain is a way of . . . finding your way, a route and a detour to yourself.”
Many hundreds of de Waal’s pots have landed in museums, usually in carefully choreographed groups he calls “cargoes,” after the loads that were shipped from China to Europe before the West figured out how to make its own porcelain. One of his more spectacular installations, Signs & Wonders, consists of 425 porcelain vessels set on a circular red shelf mounted neck-craningly high in the dome of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. A 2013 show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York featured an installation called breathturn, comprising large vitrines of rhythmically grouped simple cylindrical pots.
So it’s no wonder he’s been called the Great Waal of China. It’s a moniker reinforced by The White Road, in which he declares his passion and his purpose:
It is really quite simple, a pilgrimage of sorts to beginnings, a chance to walk up the mountain where the white earth comes from . . . I have a plan to get to three places where porcelain was invented, or reinvented, three white hills in China and Germany and England. Each of them matters to me. I have known of them for decades from pots and books and stories but I have never visited. I need to get to these places, need to see how porcelain looks under different skies, how white changes with the weather. Other things in the world are white but, for me, porcelain comes first.
DeWaal begins his journey in Jingdezhen, China, “the fabled Ur where it all starts.” He visits factories, markets, and the first of what he calls his White Hills, Mount Kao-ling. This is the source of the white clay that gave the earliest twelfth-century porcelain its plasticity, strength, and bones — and also the name kaolin. Along with kaolin, porcelain requires a second kind of mineral, petunse or porcelain stone, called “little white brick” in Chinese. Sourcing and then determining the right proportions of these two materials — which must be fired above 1,300 degrees Celsius to achieve the desired hard white vitrified translucency — were part of the challenge of early porcelain experimentation.
De Waal is a tenacious, wide-ranging researcher. He doggedly tracks porcelain over hill and dale on multiple continents, from Jingdezhen to Versailles to Dresden to Cornwall, and even to the Ayoree Mountain in former Cherokee territory in South Carolina. In each locale, he zeroes in on a single, exquisite iconic white object: an early-fifteenth-century monk’s cap ewer made for the emperor Yongle in Jingdezhen; a white Meissen cup made in Dresden in 1715; a cider tankard fabricated in 1768 by apothecary William Cookworthy, “the first piece of true porcelain ever made in England.” While the proliferation of porcelain was stimulated by the cravings of kings and emperors, it was chemists and alchemists who discovered its secrets in the West.
De Waal makes some odd narrative choices that book groups might want to discuss along with deeper questions about the meanings that cluster around the color white and the cultural significance of porcelain. This is a more personal book than his last, and he intermittently employs the present tense and the second person, often about himself. “You buy for research,” he writes when purchasing blue and white fragments at a Chinese market. At one point, an obliquely revealing line jumps out at us and causes us to wonder whether he regrets his chosen path: “There is a moment when the idea that something is a vocation becomes so internalized that you end up a priest, a potter, a poet, and you are just too embarrassed to walk away.”
The second-person narration, presumably meant to lend immediacy and bring readers closer, is especially jolting when de Waal writes about the Holocaust. The most riveting section of the book concerns the Allach Porcelain Factory, Heinrich Himmler’s pet project for turning out gifts such as white animal figurines and statuettes of Hitler Youth and SS officers. The factory was moved from Munich to the Dachau concentration camp during World War II for its ready access to slave labor. De Waal’s use of the second person to capture the hellish conditions seems a misguided, awkward attempt to include the reader: “Death comes to you randomly. You are killed trying to escape. You are killed as an example.”
Trekking along with de Waal, you sometimes weary of his leaving no pot unturned. His excitement about mathematician Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus and alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger — both prominent in fabricating porcelain in eighteenth-century Dresden — exceeds ours (though they do seem like characters you might find in a Tom Stoppard play). On the other hand, I kept waiting for an explanation of the difference between porcelain and bone china, which I ultimately found on the Internet. (The addition of bone ash gives bone china a warmer color than the brighter white of porcelain, which, fired at a higher temperature, is harder and more durable.)
Although admittedly obsessed, de Waal is also refreshingly knowledgeable and opinionated. About the eighteenth-century English Quaker merchant who took over William Cookworthy’s patent for porcelain, he writes, “His self-confidence borders on the alarming.” He reassures us that “It’s not that I like all porcelain,” and deems an eighteenth-century footed Meissen bowl downright “passive-aggressive”: “It is valuable. Its insipidity is total.”
He also concedes, “This white porcelain has cost. Obsession costs.” He acknowledges the environmental toll of ravaged hills and silted rivers, the health repercussions like Potter’s Rot or silicosis from inhaling ceramic dust, the unfortunate history of child labor in Staffordshire and Jingdezhen factories to meet ever-growing demand. Porcelain has other downsides: It is a fragile substance with a high failure rate — lots of breakage in firing, glazing, and shipping. (I’m reminded of baseball, where failing to reach base safely two-thirds of the time is considered a terrific batting average.)
Yet despite these drawbacks de Waal insists that “The manner of what we make defines us.” Between his pots and his books, he is certainly well defined. Like his ceramic installations, The White Road turns a somewhat esoteric subject into a fascinating exploration of passion and perseverance.
De Waal is a lively guide. He discovered his passion for “pots,” as he calls them, at the ridiculously young age of five. What followed, he writes, is “forty-plus years of sitting, slightly hunched with a moving wheel and a moving piece of clay trying to still a small part of the world, make an inside space.” Over the decades, he worked his way from earthenware to stoneware to porcelain. He estimates that he has thrown tens of thousands of pots, the vast majority of which are glazed in shades of white or the lightest celadons, greys, and creams. White, he writes, “is a way of starting again. It is not about good taste . . . making porcelain is a way of . . . finding your way, a route and a detour to yourself.”
Many hundreds of de Waal’s pots have landed in museums, usually in carefully choreographed groups he calls “cargoes,” after the loads that were shipped from China to Europe before the West figured out how to make its own porcelain. One of his more spectacular installations, Signs & Wonders, consists of 425 porcelain vessels set on a circular red shelf mounted neck-craningly high in the dome of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. A 2013 show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York featured an installation called breathturn, comprising large vitrines of rhythmically grouped simple cylindrical pots.
So it’s no wonder he’s been called the Great Waal of China. It’s a moniker reinforced by The White Road, in which he declares his passion and his purpose:
It is really quite simple, a pilgrimage of sorts to beginnings, a chance to walk up the mountain where the white earth comes from . . . I have a plan to get to three places where porcelain was invented, or reinvented, three white hills in China and Germany and England. Each of them matters to me. I have known of them for decades from pots and books and stories but I have never visited. I need to get to these places, need to see how porcelain looks under different skies, how white changes with the weather. Other things in the world are white but, for me, porcelain comes first.
DeWaal begins his journey in Jingdezhen, China, “the fabled Ur where it all starts.” He visits factories, markets, and the first of what he calls his White Hills, Mount Kao-ling. This is the source of the white clay that gave the earliest twelfth-century porcelain its plasticity, strength, and bones — and also the name kaolin. Along with kaolin, porcelain requires a second kind of mineral, petunse or porcelain stone, called “little white brick” in Chinese. Sourcing and then determining the right proportions of these two materials — which must be fired above 1,300 degrees Celsius to achieve the desired hard white vitrified translucency — were part of the challenge of early porcelain experimentation.
De Waal is a tenacious, wide-ranging researcher. He doggedly tracks porcelain over hill and dale on multiple continents, from Jingdezhen to Versailles to Dresden to Cornwall, and even to the Ayoree Mountain in former Cherokee territory in South Carolina. In each locale, he zeroes in on a single, exquisite iconic white object: an early-fifteenth-century monk’s cap ewer made for the emperor Yongle in Jingdezhen; a white Meissen cup made in Dresden in 1715; a cider tankard fabricated in 1768 by apothecary William Cookworthy, “the first piece of true porcelain ever made in England.” While the proliferation of porcelain was stimulated by the cravings of kings and emperors, it was chemists and alchemists who discovered its secrets in the West.
De Waal makes some odd narrative choices that book groups might want to discuss along with deeper questions about the meanings that cluster around the color white and the cultural significance of porcelain. This is a more personal book than his last, and he intermittently employs the present tense and the second person, often about himself. “You buy for research,” he writes when purchasing blue and white fragments at a Chinese market. At one point, an obliquely revealing line jumps out at us and causes us to wonder whether he regrets his chosen path: “There is a moment when the idea that something is a vocation becomes so internalized that you end up a priest, a potter, a poet, and you are just too embarrassed to walk away.”
The second-person narration, presumably meant to lend immediacy and bring readers closer, is especially jolting when de Waal writes about the Holocaust. The most riveting section of the book concerns the Allach Porcelain Factory, Heinrich Himmler’s pet project for turning out gifts such as white animal figurines and statuettes of Hitler Youth and SS officers. The factory was moved from Munich to the Dachau concentration camp during World War II for its ready access to slave labor. De Waal’s use of the second person to capture the hellish conditions seems a misguided, awkward attempt to include the reader: “Death comes to you randomly. You are killed trying to escape. You are killed as an example.”
Trekking along with de Waal, you sometimes weary of his leaving no pot unturned. His excitement about mathematician Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus and alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger — both prominent in fabricating porcelain in eighteenth-century Dresden — exceeds ours (though they do seem like characters you might find in a Tom Stoppard play). On the other hand, I kept waiting for an explanation of the difference between porcelain and bone china, which I ultimately found on the Internet. (The addition of bone ash gives bone china a warmer color than the brighter white of porcelain, which, fired at a higher temperature, is harder and more durable.)
Although admittedly obsessed, de Waal is also refreshingly knowledgeable and opinionated. About the eighteenth-century English Quaker merchant who took over William Cookworthy’s patent for porcelain, he writes, “His self-confidence borders on the alarming.” He reassures us that “It’s not that I like all porcelain,” and deems an eighteenth-century footed Meissen bowl downright “passive-aggressive”: “It is valuable. Its insipidity is total.”
He also concedes, “This white porcelain has cost. Obsession costs.” He acknowledges the environmental toll of ravaged hills and silted rivers, the health repercussions like Potter’s Rot or silicosis from inhaling ceramic dust, the unfortunate history of child labor in Staffordshire and Jingdezhen factories to meet ever-growing demand. Porcelain has other downsides: It is a fragile substance with a high failure rate — lots of breakage in firing, glazing, and shipping. (I’m reminded of baseball, where failing to reach base safely two-thirds of the time is considered a terrific batting average.)
Yet despite these drawbacks de Waal insists that “The manner of what we make defines us.” Between his pots and his books, he is certainly well defined. Like his ceramic installations, The White Road turns a somewhat esoteric subject into a fascinating exploration of passion and perseverance.