The King Who Traded Soldiers for Porcelain

In 1717, Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, traded six hundred cavalry soldiers to the King of Prussia in exchange for one hundred and fifty-one pieces of Chinese porcelain.

The soldiers were real. The exchange was recorded. The porcelain, a collection of large blue-and-white vases, was installed in a Dresden palace and catalogued with the same seriousness applied to military assets. Augustus called them his Dragoon Vases, after the regiment he had given up to obtain them. He did not appear to consider this a poor trade.

By the time that exchange was made, Augustus had already spent years pursuing something far more valuable than the vases themselves: the secret of how they were made.

White gold

Europeans had been importing Chinese porcelain since the thirteenth century, and had been failing to replicate it for almost as long. The problem was not the glaze or the shape. It was the clay: a specific combination of kaolin and petuntse, fired at temperatures European kilns could barely reach, that produced a translucent white body harder and finer than anything made in Europe. The Chinese called it ci. Europeans called it white gold, and they meant it as a statement of value, not poetry.

Entire industries grew up to produce imitations. Tin-glazed earthenware from Delft, Faenza, and Rouen achieved the white surface but not the hardness. Medici porcelain in Florence came close, then stopped. The formula, the Arcanum as it came to be called, remained stubbornly Chinese.

Augustus wanted the real thing. He filled a palace in Dresden with what he could import, eventually accumulating more than thirty-five thousand pieces. He called it the Japanese Palace, though the contents were predominantly Chinese, and he dreamed of lining every room floor to ceiling with porcelain. What he wanted more than pieces, though, was production. A Saxon porcelain factory, under his control, making the genuine article. He was prepared to apply considerable pressure to get it.

The alchemist in the castle

Johann Friedrich Böttger was twenty years old when Augustus had him imprisoned in 1701. He was not a ceramicist. He was an apothecary’s apprentice who had made the serious miscalculation of claiming, publicly, that he could turn base metals into gold. Word reached the Elector. Böttger fled Berlin but was captured in Saxony, where Augustus confined him to a laboratory and instructed him to produce the gold he had promised.

He could not produce gold. But he worked alongside a scholar named Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, who had been quietly investigating the porcelain problem for years. Tschirnhaus understood the chemistry of high-temperature firing in ways that had eluded earlier European experimenters. Together, under confinement, the two men worked their way toward something remarkable.

Around 1707 they produced a dense red stoneware, harder than anything previously made in Europe. It was not porcelain, but it was a step. Then Tschirnhaus died, in October 1708, before the work was finished. Böttger continued alone. By early 1709, he had it: a white, translucent, hard-paste porcelain. The Arcanum, held in China for a thousand years, had been found in a castle in Saxony by a man who had originally been imprisoned for a completely different purpose.

God our Creator has turned one alchemist into a potter.

Böttger wrote those words in his notes sometime around 1709. The self-deprecation is either genuine or careful. He was still, technically, a prisoner.

The factory on the hill

In January 1710, Augustus established the Royal Saxon Porcelain Manufactory at Albrechtsburg castle in Meissen, a hilltop fortress twenty miles upriver from Dresden. The location was deliberate. A castle was easy to guard. The workers were not free to leave. The formula was to remain secret at any cost.

Böttger was made director of the factory. He was also still, in most practical respects, confined. He would remain under various degrees of restriction for the rest of his life, and he died in 1719, at thirty-seven, without ever receiving the freedom or wealth his discovery might reasonably have earned him. Augustus kept the Arcanum close and the man who found it closer.

Despite everything, the factory flourished. The sculptor Johann Joachim Kändler arrived in the 1730s and transformed what had been a technical achievement into an artistic one: elaborate figurines, painted services, forms that had no precedent in Chinese originals and no equal in European craft. The crossed blue swords mark, introduced around 1720, was the first industrial trademark in history, designed specifically to distinguish genuine Meissen from the imitations that were already appearing.

The secret that could not be kept

The Arcanum held for about eight years. In 1719, a kiln worker named Samuel Stölzel slipped out of Meissen and carried the formula to Vienna, where the Du Paquier factory became the second European hard-paste porcelain manufacturer. From Vienna the knowledge spread: to Venice, to Nymphenburg, to Berlin, to Sèvres. Within fifty years, almost every major European court had its own porcelain factory, each claiming a royal patron and a jealously guarded secret formula that was, by then, not particularly secret.

The age of European porcelain had begun, and it had begun because one king wanted Chinese vases badly enough to imprison a man until the problem was solved. The crossed swords are still stamped onto every piece that leaves Meissen today, three hundred years later, from a factory that is still operating on the same hill.