This is a family journey. Thank you Ben, thank you Matthew and thank you Anna.
This is for Sue, who has been alongside me every step of the way.
A Note About the Author
Edmund de Waal is one of the world’s leading ceramic artists, and his porcelain is held in many major international collections. His bestselling memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, was shortlisted for numerous prizes and won the Costa Biography Award and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. You can sign up for email updates here.
Also by Edmund de Waal The Hare with the Amber Eyes
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Contents
Title Page
Copyrigh Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE Jingdezhen – Venice – Dublin
PART ONE Jingdezhen
One on shards
Two sorry
Three Mount Kao-ling
Four making and decorating and glazing and firing
Five how to make big pots
Six obligations
Seven Factory #72
Eight Counterfeit. Forgery. Sham.
Nine ten thousand things
Ten the monk’s cap ewer
Eleven I read everything. I understand. Continue.
Twelve setting out
Thirteen Men in black
Fourteen the emperor’s Tea Set
PART TWO Versailles – Dresden
Fifteen the latest news from China
Sixteen the porcelain pavilion
Seventeen cream-coloured, provincial and opaque
Eighteen opticks
Nineteen the first mode of formation
Twenty gifts and promises and titles
Twenty-One the shuffle of things
Twenty-Two a path, a vocation
Twenty-Three extraordinarily curious
Twenty-Four there is no gold
Twenty-Five ‘double, or even triple amount of effort’
Twenty-Six promises, promises
Twenty-Seven half translucent and milk white, like a narcissus
Twenty-Eight the invention of Saxon porcelain
Twenty-Nine porcelain rooms, porcelain cities
Thirty 1719
PART THREE Plymouth
Thirty-One The Birth of English Porcelain
Thirty-Two Three Scruples make a Dram
Thirty-Three A Quaker! A Quaker! A Quirl!
Thirty-Four a greater rain
Thirty-Five covering the ground
Thirty-Six shillings, pebbles, or buttons
Thirty-Seven Letters Edifying and Curious
Thirty-Eight readily stained in use
Thirty-Nine china earth
Forty-One silences
Forty-Two Tregonning Hill
Forty-Three brighter in white objects
Forty-Four thoughts of whiteness
PART FOUR Ayoree Mountain – Etruria – Cornwall
Forty-Five an Idea of perfect Porcellain
Forty-Six Ayoree Mountain
Forty-Seven C.F.
Forty-Eight on Englishness
Forty-Nine endings, beginnings
Fifty a cunning specification
Fifty-One Gray’s Elegy
Fifty-Two a journey into Cornwall
Fifty-Three Thoughts Concerning Emigration
Fifty-Four a road trip
Fifty-Five 1790
PART FIVE London – Jingdezhen – Dachau
Fifty-Six Signs & Wonders
Fifty-Seven 1919
Fifty-Eight red labour
Fifty-Nine Bright Earth, Fired Earth
Sixty what whiteness, what candor
Sixty-One Allach
Sixty-Two false sail
Sixty-Three correct in orientation
Sixty-Four another witness
Sixty-Five The Boehm Porcelain Co. of Trenton, New Jersey
CODA London – New York – London
Sixty-Six breathturn
Further reading
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
A Note About the Author
Also by Edmund de Waal
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2015 by Edmund de Waal
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2015 by Chatto & Windus, Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2015
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
De Waal, Edmund, author.
The white road: journey into an obsession / Edmund de Waal. — First American edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-374-28926-3 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-70909-9 (e-book) 1. Porcelain—History. 2. De Waal, Edmund—Travel. I. Title.
NK4370.D45 2015
738.209—dc23
2015022207
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eISBN 9780374709099