Summary of Edmund de Waal's The White Road

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822537507

IRB Media

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Insights on Edmund de Waal's The White Road

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 1

#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.

#5

Petunse is not difficult to find around here, and old mine workings from the Sung Dynasty have been excavated close to the city itself. The best was designated for imperial use and deemed official with heavy punishments for offenders who tried to work with it.

#6

The Tao Lu explained to me that the sheds were seasonal and that in spring with rushing water, the hammers would pound the petunse finer. In midsummer, the stone was grainier, making the process slower.

#7

The process of making petunse involves mixing white powdered stone and water, and then pouring it into a pit. The resulting slurry is then stirred with paddles. The resulting substance is left to dry outside in shallow pits until it becomes a white sludge.

#8

The road continues to climb. There are ramshackle houses and paddy fields cut into the hillside. The air is very cold in the mine. The mine runs twenty feet back and then peters out in a rockfall. I run