Porcelain Sickness

My favorite thing about school is the amazing people that I meet, and the incredible stories they tell while teaching me about their specialty. One of the most delightful and entertaining of these has been Tish Roberts, an expert on the subject of porcelain. A small, spry Philadelphian, she has the knack of inserting the most hilarious asides in her lectures on the seemingly staid subject of ceramics.

As it turns out, porcelain has a very exotic, adventurous, and elaborate history. The Chinese have made porcelain expertly for thousands of years, so when Europeans discovered this and began to bring the stuff back to Europe, people went literally crazy over it. Perhaps the craziest was Augustust II, Prince of Saxony, known as Augustus the Strong not for his muscles, but his ability to sire children (they say he fathered over 300!) But his main passion was for porcelain. He amassed a gigantic collection of precious objects including all the porcelain he could lay his hands on. He told people he would build a palace out of porcelain if he could.

This obsessive porcelain collecting reached ridiculous heights when Augustus traded 600 of his soldiers to the King of Prussia in exchange for 151 blue and white Chinese porcelain vases. Part of the reason porcelain was so prized during these times was the fact that no European knew how to make it--China held the secret, and they weren't telling.

But, luckily for Augustus, he had in his employ one alchemist, Johann Bottger, who was in charge of turning base metal into gold. Obviously failing at that task, he was imprisoned and about to be executed when he stumbled upon an even greater discovery--the secret of how to make "white gold," porcelain. The secret lay in kaolin, a white clay that creates the hard, white, translucent ceramic that Europeans loved so much. And as fate would have it, Augustus the Strong had kaolin deposits in his kingdom. Soon enough he had formed his own porcelain manufactory in Dresden, and the rest is history.

You can't make this stuff up!

Tish says that the history of ceramics is the history of mankind, and I believe it.