Forty metres down, the wood rotted. The painting did not.
The Geldermalsen sank in January 1752 with a floor of Jingdezhen porcelain in her hold. Rub the silt away with your finger and see what the sea could not reach.
Rub the vase
Porcelain was the floor of the hold.
Chests of it were laid across the bottom as heavy, dry flooring, with the tea stacked above. When the ship broke up, the tea burst and wrapped the porcelain in leaves. About 150,000 pieces came up in 1985.
Tap a bowl. Down here you hear it through water.
Why the blue came back.
Cobalt goes on raw clay, under the glaze, and fires near 1,300 °C until body and glaze are one glass. Seawater has nothing to get into. Enamels fired on top of the glaze came up black, or came up gone.
Spin it
Thin as paper.
The saying goes: white as jade, thin as paper, bright as a mirror, sound as a chime. Eggshell walls are under a millimetre. Each rice grain is a hole pierced through the wall and filled with glaze, so light passes and water does not.
Drag the bowl across the sun
Sound as a chime.
In the Tang, musicians set out twelve porcelain bowls, tuned them with water and played them with chopsticks. More water, lower note. Tip the pot over a cup, then tap along the row.
- Goods
- Marks
- Jingdezhen
- Value
Menders once drilled blind holes with a diamond and stapled porcelain back together. The craft is called ju ci.
Sample catalogue. Names and prices are placeholders, and everything shown is a modern piece, not salvage.
Upriver, the way it came.
Down the Chang to Poyang Lake, up the Gan through eighteen rapids, over the Meiling Pass on shoulder poles, down the North River to Canton. A month or two by water, and before that, the kiln.
Seventy-two hands. Be the first.
Song Yingxing wrote in 1637 that one piece of clay passes through seventy-two hands. Press the spinning clay to shape it. Pull up from the rim to raise the wall.