The White Road: Journey into an obsession

Journey into an obsession

Plot

"For decades, the acclaimed potter and author Edmund de Waal has been captivated by porcelain -its fragility, lucidity, tactility, and whiteness. After a lifetime of making his own pots, he embarks on an unforgettable journey into the "white hills" of China, Germany, England, and America, where porcelain was "invented, or reinvented", out of a seemingly mystical longing. Setting out from his South London studio, de Waal travels first to Jingdezhen, "the fabled Ur" where the story of porcelain begins: Ït is the city of secrets, a millenium of skills, fifty generations of digging and cleaning and mixing white earth, making and knowing porcelain, full of workshops, potters, glazers and decorators, merchants, hustlers and spies." For five hundred years, no one in the West knew how porcelain was made. Yet the voracious demand for the alluring ceramics eventually spurred a feverish race among chemists, naturalists, Jesuits, philosophers, and kings to discover the secrets of this "white gold". As de Waal traces the connections between these early figures, he unearths a remarkable story of lust, luck, ingenuity, and arresting beauty. In Dresden, the "Second Porcelain City", he discovers the insipred collaboration between a mathematician and an alchemist who worked together under King Augustus II, the "emperor of white", whose insatiable craving for porcelain kept Chinese Kilns burning "day and night". In Versailles, Louis XIV nearly went mad for the "glorious secret" of the clay mixture and had a porcelain pavilion built for his mistress. In Plymouth, de Waal finds the first piece of porcelain ever made in England -a cider tankard- that still "rings clear", and tells of William Cookworthy, a Quaker apothecary who almost suffered a mental breakdown trying to outsmart the peg-legged Josiah Wedgwood in the search for the right fusion of white stones scattered across the Cornwall hills and ingredients coming in from the Carolinas across the Atlantic. At Dachau, de Waal ventures into the wretched place where the story of porcelain intersects with the dark currents of the twentieth century. "Only someone for whom onjects are as meaningful as they are for Edmund de Waal could have performed his quest", wrote Walter Kaiser in his reiew of de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes for The New York Review of Books. Önly someone with his intelligence and sensitivity could have written such a fascinating account of his journey". The same can be said of The White Road, another quest for the profound connection between material objects and human experience."