The Arcanum (5 page)

Augustus's appetite for beautiful porcelain was every bit as compulsive as his desire for beautiful women, and his royal ascendancy
allowed him a similarly free rein to indulge himself. If Tschirnhaus could find a way of making this highly prized material
he would not only satisfy the king's desire to develop local resources; he might also stem the flow of untold sums of revenue
to the Orient. So while the young Böttger was trying to turn lead into gold in Berlin, as he languished under arrest in Wittenberg,
and as he now pursued his alchemical experiments as a prisoner in Dresden, Tschirnhaus was searching equally fervently for
what appeared to be a no less elusive arcanum—the formula for turning clay into porcelain.

We are not thorowly resolved concerning Porcellane or Chyna dishes, that according to common beliefe they are made of earth
which lyeth in preparation about an hundred yeeres underground, for the relations thereof are not only divers, but contrary,
and Authors agree not herein. Guido Pancirollus will have them made of Egge shells, Lobster shells, and Gypsum layed up in
the earth the space of eighty yeeres: of the same affirmation is Scaliger, and the common opinion of most. Ramuzius in his
Navigations is of a contrary assertion, that they are made out of earth, not laid under ground, but hardened in the Sunne
and winde, the space of fourty yeeres.

T
HOMAS
B
ROWNE,
Vulgar Errors,
1646

U
nder orders from Augustus, the captive Böttger was to be supervised in his search for gold by two trusted courtiers, Michael
Nehmitz and Pabst von Ohain, and helped by three assistants. Apart from these five men he was allowed to talk to no one, there
was no contact with the outside world, and even the windows were shuttered against Prussian spies who, it was still feared,
might attempt to kidnap him.

In Warsaw the king was impatient for evidence of his new captive's skill. Instructions were sent to von Fürstenberg to bring
a sample of the philosopher's stone as quickly as possible. Böttger was reluctantly obliged to pack a traveling casket with
his mysterious powder, some quicksilver (mercury) and various other ingredients and pieces of equipment and to brief von Fürstenberg
on how to carry out the experiment. According to some accounts, when von Fürstenberg arrived in Warsaw on December 14, 1701,
the king's dog knocked the casket containing these precious ingredients on the floor and some of the fragile vials broke.
The lost ingredients were replaced and then, two weeks later, in a secret room in the Warsaw palace, the experiment finally
went ahead under cover of darkness. By flickering candlelight the king and von Fürstenberg donned leather aprons before lighting
the fire and following Böttger's instructions as closely as they could remember them. Predictably, after hours of boiling,
mixing, stoking and bellowing the experiment yielded nothing but a hard metallic mass that was certainly nothing like gold.
Discouraging though this must have been, Augustus was undaunted and ordered that the young alchemist be forced to continue
his research.

The restrictions of confinement and enforced labor at the Goldhouse rapidly took their toll on Böttger's mental well-being.
His life with Zorn had accustomed him to having the liberty to pursue, albeit covertly, his own research—and to set up his
miraculous transmutations. Now secrecy, privacy and liberty of any kind were denied and the threat of death was never far
away. He grew fearful, depressed and prone to occasional fits of hysteria during which, according to colorful contemporary
reports, he would drink to excess and bellow like a bull, grind his teeth, bang his head against the cell walls, cry and tremble
uncontrollably. Convinced that these scenes were nothing but a sham to avoid having to hand over the arcanum, Augustus tried
dispatching him to the bleak cliff top fortress prison of Königstein, in the hope that isolation would shock him out of his
histrionics. But this severe treatment in fact had the very opposite effect and Böttger's mental state deteriorated still
further. His jailer reported back to Dresden that the prisoner was at times uncontrollable, needing two guards to restrain
him. During these seizures his jailers found that satisfying his apparently unquenchable thirst for wine and beer was one
of the few ways of calming him down, and as they fed his craving Böttger discovered that alcoholic oblivion was the most effective
means of numbing the misery of his confinement and obliterating the fear of execution.

Realizing from the guards' reports that even if Böttger was not already mad, keeping him in such intolerable conditions was
likely to drive him to insanity before he produced any useful results, Augustus permitted the conditions of Böttger's imprisonment
to be improved. He was recalled from Königstein and allowed two comfortable rooms in part of the royal palace with a view
of the gardens, and for the first time, he was allowed to have limited access to outsiders.

The slightly more relaxed regime made Böttger's job of convincing Augustus that he was on the brink of a major breakthrough
much easier. In June 1703 he made his most ridiculous promise so far, writing to the king, “At last, by faithfulness and diligence
I have come to the point of being able to produce for Your Majesty by next Peter and Paul Day a sum of 300,000 thalers and
thereafter 100,000 thalers monthly.” Augustus was so convinced that vast quantities of gold were imminent that he appointed
Böttger master of the mint. It was Böttger's sheer terror of the repercussions of his failure to deliver this sum that led
to his desperate escape to Bohemia.

At some stage during these experiments, perhaps even before he ran away and was recaptured, Tschirnhaus was introduced to
the renegade alchemist and they dined together in Prince von Fürstenberg's castle. Böttger, engrossed in trying to discover
the recipe for gold, impressed the older scientist with his profound knowledge of chemistry and they must have discussed Tschirnhaus's
own work. The two men established a rapport and over the next months of Böttger's imprisonment Tschirnhaus regularly visited
the captive alchemist and began to tell him in more detail of his quest for the secret of porcelain.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, true porcelain was only made in the Far East, primarily in China and Japan. Silk,
lacquer and spices had been imported to Europe since the Middle Ages via the great Silk Road, the overland route from Asia
to the West, but porcelain was too fragile to be transported in such a way and the few pieces that arrived in the West were
mostly shipped through the Gulf of Arabia or the Red Sea by Arab traders. There was no large-scale organized trade until after
Vasco da Gama's voyage of discovery in 1497 opened a sea route to China.

From the first, porcelain was regarded by the Western world as one of the most coveted rarities of the Orient, whose mysterious
allure it encapsulated by its seemingly impossible combination of extraordinary fragility, coupled with glittering hardness.
Modern science tells us that this strange substance made by these ancient potters is in fact so hard that ordinary steel cannot
cut it.

The scarce early pieces that survive were often given to rulers as papal or diplomatic gifts, and their preciousness in Western
eyes is reinforced by the way in which they were meticulously adorned with intricately wrought handles, lids and stands made
from solid gold and silver and often studded with gems. Such rare and costly items are found in numerous royal treasuries.
In the fifteenth century the powerful doges of Venice were presented with Ming porcelain by visiting sultans from Egypt, who
also gave it to Charles VII of France and Lorenzo de Medici. Among the treasures listed in Henry VIII's inventory were “A
cup of Purselaine glasse fation with two handles garnisshid with siluer and guilt, the Couer garnished with iij Camewe heddes
and thre garnettes,” which he had probably been given by the King of France.

As a matchless symbol of artistic perfection, worthy of only the most formidable potentates, porcelain appears from time to
time in the work of Renaissance painters as an exotic attribute of the gods of the Christian and pagan worlds. When Mantegna
painted the
Adoration of the Magi
that now hangs in the Uffizi, the gifts the three kings reverently presented to the Savior were enclosed in a vessel resembling
Oriental porcelain. When the Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini set to work in 1512 to paint a
Feast of the Gods
for Alfonso d'Este's Alabaster Chamber in the castle of Ferrara, the banquet served to Bacchus and his fellows by the assembled
satyrs and nymphs was presented upon Ming porcelain bowls, identical to some in the Topkapi Palace, Istanbul, which Bellini
is known to have visited. Thus, slowly but surely, porcelain inveigled its way into public consciousness as a symbol of sacred
beauty of the most mysterious and elusive kind.

After Portuguese merchants established a sea route to China and Japan in the sixteenth century, trade in porcelain steadily
grew as Oriental potters massively boosted their output (often at the expense of quality). By the middle of the century Portuguese
carracks weighed down with dishes, vases, bowls and a myriad other porcelain items plied the seas between Macao and Lisbon.
Later the Dutch East India Company also joined in the lucrative trade, and literally hundreds of thousands of pieces flooded
into Dutch ports to feed the West's apparently unquenchable appetite for such exotica.

Throughout the later seventeenth century, porcelain of widely varying standards was imported in ever larger quantities, much
of it a useful and lucrative ballast in the parts of the merchantmen where other luxury cargoes such as tea and spices, lacquer
and silk could not be stowed because of the threat from water damage. The fashion quickly spread from mainland Europe across
the Channel to England, where, according to Daniel Defoe, it was introduced by Queen Mary, who, he lamented, had given royal
sanction to “the custom or humour, as I may call it, of furnishing houses with chinaware, which increased to a strange degree
afterwards, piling their china upon the tops of cabinets, scrutores, and every chimney-piece, to the tops of the ceilings,
and even setting up shelves for their chinaware, where they wanted such places, till it became a grievance in the expense
of it, and even injurious to their families and estates.”

In fact, though she certainly exemplifies the trend for china mania, Mary did not establish it in England; the fashion was
well entrenched before she ascended the throne in 1689. Queen Elizabeth I had encouraged her maverick naval captains to appropriate
Spanish ships laden with treasure from the East whenever possible. One such vessel, the
Madre de Dios,
captured in 1592, was filled with, among other things: “elephants teeth, porcellan vessels of China, coconuts, ebenwood as
black as jet, bedstead of the same cloth of the rinds of trees very strange.” A decade before Mary became queen, when William
Wycherley's immoral comic play
The Country Wife
was performed in c. 1675, English society was already in the throes of an orgy of collecting. “China,” as porcelain was popularly
known, had become such an alluring, exotic, tantalizingly elusive prize that Wycherley used the word as a euphemism for the
act of sex. In the play, the lodgings of a libertine, aptly named Mr. Horner, are described as “the china house” and provide
the setting for marital infidelity. When Horner appears on stage with the married Lady Fiddler, he is confronted with a second
eager admirer who entreats him: “…don't think to give other people china, and me none; come in with me too.” To this admonition
Lady Fiddler replies, “What d'ye think if he had had any left, I would not have had it too? for we women of quality never
think we have china enough.” The exhausted Horner, however, has to disappoint her with the words, “Do not take ill, I cannot
make china for you all, but I will have a roll-wagon for you too, another time.” A roll-wagon in seventeenth-century parlance
was a slender phallically shaped Chinese vase. To the informed audience of Wycherley's day, the sexual allusion would have
been abundantly clear.

But not all the porcelain that found its way to Europe was of a quality suited to the bawdiness of the London playhouse. By
the early eighteenth century, as Böttger languished in his Dresden prison, the heavily laden ships that plied the treacherous
pirate-ridden seas between Canton and Amsterdam carried porcelain wares of unparalleled beauty and refinement, and these were
the treasures that Augustus craved. The so-called Nanking cargo, which aroused a furor among porcelain collectors when it
was salvaged from its watery grave and auctioned in the 1980s, was, though of a later date, typical of the objects exported
to the West.

The sale comprised more than 100,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain stowed aboard a Dutch merchantman, the
Geldermalsen,
which in 1752 struck an uncharted reef in the South China Sea on her return journey from Canton to Holland. Most were unrefined
kitchen wares but some were vases around which long-tailed, multiclawed dragons curled, from which pinnacled pagodas rose,
or luscious many-petaled peonies blossomed. There were plates bedecked with pools full of rippling fantailed fish, branches
populated with exotically plumed birds set in gardens of bamboo and craggy rock-studded landscapes. To Augustus, such exquisitely
decorated objects offered him glimpses of a fantasy landscape, a porcelain world of compelling fascination, of whose beauty,
unlike that of his mistresses, he never tired.