The White Road: Journey into an Obsession

"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"