Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I was able to find shards of porcelain in the dirt near the farmer’s house. They were the base of a twelfth-century wine cup, a fine tapering stem holding a jagged bowl, a thumb’s breadth across. It was impossibly thin.
#2 The kilns were long gone, but the bricks were used for a shed or pigsty, and the slopes were useful for building into. The bamboo and these long flat grasses were cut for packing finished pots to carry down to the river.
#3 The Chinese city of Jingdezhen was the center of porcelain production for the world. It was a beautiful puzzle of a landscape, and somehow people and happenstance combined to make it the center of porcelain production for the world.
#4 Porcelain is made of two types of mineral. The first is petunse, or porcelain stone, which provides the flesh of the porcelain. It gives translucency and supplies the hardness of the body. The second is kaolin, or porcelain clay, which gives plasticity.