This is a Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller. ” Other things in the world are white but for me porcelain comes first”. A handful of clay from a Chinese hillside carries a promise: that mixed with the right materials, it might survive the fire of the kiln, & fuse into porcelain
- translucent, luminous, white. Acclaimed writer & potter Edmund de Waal sets out on a quest
- a journey that begins in the dusty city of Jingdezhen in China & travels on to Venice, Versailles, Dublin, Dresden, the Appalachian Mountains of South Carolina & the hills of Cornwall to tell the history of porcelain. Along the way, he meets the witnesses to its creation; those who were inspired, made rich or heartsick by it, & the many whose livelihoods, minds & bodies were broken by this obsession. It spans a thousand years & reaches into some of the most tragic moments of recent times. In these intimate & compelling encounters with the people & landscapes who made porcelain, Edmund de Waal enriches his understanding of this rare material, the `white gold` he has worked with for decades. It was also the Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4.