瓷

choi

Ben Downing, The Shape of Obsession; It took 17th-century savants 20 years to crack the secret of how Asian porcelain was made. Wall Street Journal, Nov 29, 2015.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-shape-of-obsession-1448476275
(book review on Edmund de Waal, The White Road; A Pilgrimage of sorts. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015)

Note:
(1)
(a) The Dutch surname de Waal is an "ethnic name for a Walloon, Middle Dutch Wale (ultimately from a Germanic word meaning ‘foreign’) + the definite article de."  Dictionary of American Family Names, by Oxford University Press.
(b) Wallonia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallonia
(The demonym for Wallonia is Walloon; The root of the word Wallonia, like the words Wales, Cornwall and Wallachia,[5] is the Germanic word Walha, meaning the strangers)
(c) van (Dutch)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_(Dutch)
(In the Netherlands, and Suriname, names starting with "van" are filed under the initial letter of the following name proper, so van der Waals is filed under "W"
(d) Compare: I can not find the meaning or origin of a similar Dutch surname: de Walls or van de Waals.
(i) Noted for van de Waals force -- the “v” in lower case in English and in upper case in Dutch -- is Johannes Diderik van der Waals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Diderik_van_der_Waals
(1837-1923)
(ii) Yvette Hoitink, Prefixes in surnames. Dutch Genealogy, Apr 10, 2005.
http://www.dutchgenealogy.nl/prefixes-in-surnames/

(2) “Porzellankrankheit, the German monarch Augustus the Strong called it: porcelain sickness. So bad was his own case that by the time he died, in 1733, he had acquired more than 35,000 pieces of the ceramic, overseen an experimental program that cracked the Oriental secret of its recipe, and established the West’s first porcelain factory, at Meissen.”
(a) German English dictionary:
* Porzellan (noun neuter; from Old Italian [noun feminine] porcellana ‎cowrie, chinaware): "porcelain"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Porzellan
* Krankheit (noun feminine; [adj] krank sick, ill + suffix -heit converting an adjective into a noun): "sickness, disease"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Krankheit
(b) Augustus II the Strong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_II_the_Strong
(1670-1733; Elector of Saxony 1694-1733)
(c) Meissen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meissen
(a town of approximately 30,000 about 25 km (16 mi) northwest of Dresden on both banks of the Elbe river in the Free State of Saxony; section 2 History: named for a small river; section 3 Porcelain)

(3) “the potter Edmund de Waal * * * his best-selling previous book, ‘The Hare With Amber Eyes’ (which traced his family’s fortunes through a collection of Japanese figurines”
(a) The Hare with Amber Eyes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hare_with_Amber_Eyes
(b) The figurines at issue are netsuke 根付 (noun ne root + noun tsuke attachment).  

"Traditional Japanese garments * * * had no pockets." So a container of sorts were created. "印籠 inrō 是古代日本男性隨身攜帶的小容器，以前印籠是用來裝印章和印泥的容器，不過後來很多人拿來裝藥."  An inrō was held shut with sliding beads on cords, and the cord is attached to a netsuke.  See photo 3 in
「根付け」がこんなにすばらしい物だったとは. Nov 14, 2013
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/teinengose ... 8e76a52eb87095cab6a

, where the netsuke is the greenish disk above the belt. Because a netsuke is hold the inrō to the belt, it can be of various shapes.

choi

(4) “Porcelain is made by combining, at high heat, a mineral called petunse [also spelled as petuntse 白墩子] and a type of white clay called kaolin.”
(a) kaolinite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaolinite
(b) porcelain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porcelain
("While Xing Ware 邢瓷 [made in 邢窑 (in present-day 河北省 邢台市] is regarded as among the greatest of the Tang Dynasty porcelain, Ding Ware 定瓷 [made in 定窑 (in present-day 河北省 定州市; 明朝因瓷土用尽而废弃)] became the premier porcelain of Song Dynasty")

(5) Mr de Waal’s book The White Road “is a far cry from your grandmother’s coffee-table book on Lladró.

Lladró
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lladró

(6) In writing the book, “Mr de Waal begins by going to China’s Mount Kao-ling, after which kaolin is named, and the nearby city of Jingdezhen, home to the world’s oldest porcelain industry. * * * Yet his tone [in the book] is less often elated than troubled, for he can’t separate China’s thousand years of porcelain from its tradition of mass-scale brutality. When he thinks of the 15th-century Yongle Emperor, whose passion for porcelain was such that he commissioned a nine-story porcelain pagoda, a breathtakingly beautiful ‘wonder of the world’ until it was destroyed in 1856, Mr. de Waal struggles to square the emperor’s exquisite taste with his ‘order to execute 2,800 women in his household . . . after rumours of a plot.’ And then there are the ‘revolutionary ceramics.’ Previously Mr de Waal had seen only ‘the safe ones . . . the Maos and the pretty girls wheeling their bicycles to work.’ Now he comes across one depicting an execution, ‘with the head of a man rolling toward us.’ ”
(a) Porcelain Tower of Nanjing  南京陶塔/ 琉璃塔
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porcelain_Tower_of_Nanjing
(at the now defunct 報恩寺)
(b) 吕婕妤
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/吕婕妤

(7) “Enter Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony, who set up secret laboratories in Dresden and Meissen. After 20 years of sweaty frustration, the puzzle was finally solved in 1708 by the mathematician Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus and a mentally unstable alchemist named Johann Friedrich Böttger. The story, which involves castle vaults, giant roaring kilns, ‘burning mirrors’ (invented by von Tschirnhaus), forced work under armed guard and wild talk of the Philosopher’s Stone, reads like an account of the Manhattan Project as imagined by Umberto Eco and the Brothers Grimm, with flourishes from Tolkien.”
(a) Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenfried_Walther_von_Tschirnhaus
(1651 – 1708)
(b) Walther
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther
(is a German form of Walter)
(c) Philosopher’s Stone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher%27s_stone
(d) Umberto Eco
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco
(1932- ; Italian; is best known for his groundbreaking 1980 historical mystery novel Il nome della rosa The Name of the Rose)

choi

(8) “Next Mr de Waal tracks the career of a venturesome Quaker apothecary, William Cookworthy, who in the 1760s discovered a source of kaolin in Cornwall and managed to make porcelain with it. ‘No emperors or kings are involved,” Mr. de Waal writes in awe. “He has worked it out entirely on his own.’ In 1768 he took out a patent and founded England’s first porcelain factory, in Plymouth. A few years later another Quaker with the porcelain bug, Richard Champion, bought Cookworthy out and moved the factory to Bristol. Neither man, however, had the commercial cunning of Josiah Wedgwood, who got Champion’s patent quashed and effectively drove him out of business. By 1790, Wedgwood’s colossal Etruria Works, which made porcelain alongside bone china and “cheap white wares,” was obscuring Stoke-on-Trent beneath a blanket of smoke. Once a princely arcanum, porcelain had become just another product of the satanic mills.
(a)
(i) William Cookworthy (1705 – 1780)
(ii) Plymouth porcelain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_porcelain
(b)
(i) Etruria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruria
(The ancient people of Etruria are labelled Etruscans)

was a region/ country in central Italy.
(c) Etruria Works
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruria_Works
(opened by Josiah Wedgwood in 1769 in a district of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire; The factory ran for 180 years; section 1 Wedgwood and Etruscan art)
(d) River Trent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Trent
(section 1 Name)

There is a map of England titled "The drainage basin of the River Trent," where Stoke-on-Trent (or Stoke-upon-Trent; often abbreviated to Stoke) is marked.

(9) “After considering the uses of porcelain in revolutionary Russia (‘Malevich makes a porcelain cup’) and Bauhaus-era Germany, Mr de Waal comes to the year 1935”
(a) Kazimir Malevich
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimir_Malevich
(1878 – May 15, 1935; a Russian painter)
(b) Bauhaus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus
(1919 - 1933)

(10) “Mr de Waal reflects on his career as a potter, from his stoneware juvenilia to his first forays into porcelain and the elaborate installations of recent years.”
(a) juvenilia (n; Latin, neuter plural of adjective masculine feminine juvenilis youthful, juvenile): "works produced by an author or artist while still young"
www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/de ... n_english/juvenilia
(n) The www.merriam-webster.com describes “juvenilia” as a (Latin/ English) “noun plural” -- a noun already in plural form.

choi

(11) “ ‘The White Road’ resembles its predecessor. Like ‘The Hare With Amber Eyes,’ the book intimately explores our relationship to crafted objects, and in places its prose has the same lambent fluency. (On meeting the alchemist Böttger, von Tschirnhaus ‘sees the runnels that allow his ideas to go there, or there, or there, separate and join up like quicksilver in a dish.’) The new book also resembles the old in its self-dramatization, its way of making us privy to the joys, defeats and windings of the author’s quest. But where ‘Hare’ was an elegant piece of belles-lettres reminiscent of small classics like Geoffrey Scott’s ‘The Portrait of Zélide’ and Richard Holmes’s ‘Footsteps,’  ‘The White Road’ is a sprawling opus replete with postmodern tics and devices. It solemnly dwells on ‘desire’ and ‘poesis’ and fetishizes the fragment, or rather the shard.”
(a)
(i) lambent (adj; from Latin lambent- 'licking', from the verb lambere): "literary  (of light or fire) glowing, gleaming, or flickering with a soft radiance"
http://www.oxforddictionaries.co ... can_english/lambent
(ii) lambent (adj): "3 : marked by lightness or brilliance especially of expression"www.merriam-webster.com/inter?dest=/dictionary/lambent
(b) runnel (n)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/runnel
(c) winding (n): “a curved or sinuous course, line, or progress”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/winding
(d) belles-lettres (French, literally, fine letters; noun plural but singular in construction): "literature that is an end in itself and not merely informative; specifically :  light, entertaining, and often sophisticated literature"
merriam-webster.com/dictionary/belles%20lettres
(e) Geoffrey Scott (1884 – 1929; English; wrote a biography of Isabelle de Charrière (1740- 1805; a Dutch writer; Zélide was one of her pen names) entitled The Portrait of Zelide)  Wikipedia
(f) Richard Holmes (1945- ; English; the book "Footsteps; Adventures of a romantic biographer" was published in 1985)

In the subtitle, the biographer was himself, who "recount[ed] his biographical pursuits of four people" that yo have not heard of.
(g) poesis (n; Latin)
http://www.oxforddictionaries.co ... ican_english/poesis