The world at large knows it as Dresden china. But it hasn't been made in Dresden for years - since 1710, to be precise.
That's when Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and king of Poland, ordered the royal porcelain works moved to Meissen, about 14 miles northwest of the Saxon capital.
Three years before - according to some, while seeking a formula for producing gold - the alchemist Johann Friedrich Boettger and a team of researchers hit on a way of manufacturing a brown earthenware, which he called "jasper porcelain," and shortly thereafter the first European hard-paste white porcelain, in imitation of its much-coveted Oriental counterpart.
To Augustus (whose passion for porcelain was so great he later converted an entire palace into an exhibit hall) the news was as good as gold. For security reasons he relocated the factory to the Albrechtsburg, the late-Gothic fortress overlooking Meissen. Not only was the new site safe from prying eyes, but the surrounding area was rich in the china clay and other mineral deposits needed to sustain the operation.
Today the Albrechtsburg still dominates the Meissen landscape, its cathedral spires rising majestically above the Elbe. The city itself, with its 37,000 inhabitants, likewise retains a traditional air, with its friendly pubs and shops, and homes spread among the rolling hills.
In the early 1860s the factory was moved again, to its present location south of the center of town. Security is still a concern, however. Even today no one apart from the employees - currently 1,800 in number - is allowed into the manufacturing area. Rather, visitors are shown the museum, opened in 1916, and a series of demonstration rooms where they can see the various throwers, repairers, glazers and painters at work.
Between April 1 and Oct. 31 of every year the museum welcomes around 300,000 visitors - a number almost certain to rise with the relaxation of travel restrictions in eastern Europe. With guidebooks available in 25 languages, its 2,500-odd chronologically arranged items afford a unique view of Meissen porcelain from 1710 to the present.
They range from Boettger's red porcelain to the "new social content" of the communist era in what was until last year East Germany, which in some cases even include the use of plastic. In between, however, come some of the most ornate and beautifully executed designs in the history of the medium.
In 1720 Johann Gregorius Hoeroldt, a painter-chemist from Jena, came to work at the Meissen factory. Within a short time he developed a wide variety of burn-in colors, using metal oxides, with which he created elaborate patterns. Initially these incorporated Oriental motifs - e.g., the "Hoeroldt chinoiseries," with their idealized scenes of Far Eastern life. Eventually they would give way to patterns taken from European models, such as flower decorations and/or landscapes by Watteau, Ridinger, Boucher and various Dutch painters.
Hoeroldt was followed, in 1731, by the 24-year-old court sculptor Johann Joachim Kaendler, who in his 44 years at Meissen turned out everything from miniature figurines and decorative individual vases to monumental statues and extravagant multi-piece services. Indeed two of the museum's proudest displays are the "Red Court Dragon" dinner service (1745) that occupies the main floor between the two stairways and a replica of the multi-canopied "Great Pantheon" that fills most of the cupola above.
The best-known of all Meissen designs, however - and one much likelier to be encountered in everyday use - is the famous Meissen Onion Pattern. Dating from 1739, it depicts man's relationship to the cosmos by way of traditional geometric figures in the form of a pomegranate (the supposed "onion"), all in a striking cobalt-blue underglaze on white.
Another familiar cobalt-blue design is the crossed swords that, since 1723, have in one form or another stood as the factory trademark. Representing the swords in the coat of arms of the Elector of Saxony, they are to this day hand-painted on every piece.
Although their rococo extravagance dazzles the eye today, whether emanating from clocks, vases or even the occasional humorous figure (e.g., the "Monkey Band" from around 1765, in which the various simian musicians are decked out in full court regalia), inevitably Kaendler's work came to be regarded as passe. Cleaner lines, smoother surfaces and a conscious striving for classical simplicity began to dominate the designs of the early 1800s. Before long, however, the earlier styles were reintroduced in ways that sometimes combined them in ingenious fashion.
At the same time the raw materials themselves were being readapted. Around 1827 the first lithophanes, a type of transluscent porcelain, were made in Paris and Berlin. Within a year they were also being produced at Meissen for everything from lampshades to almost-three-dimensional insets within larger pieces. Then in 1830 the chemist-technician Heinrich Gottlob Kuehn managed to invent a liquid-gold preparation - the so-called "bright gold" - which after baking required no further polishing.
If anything, these developments helped make Meissen's "second rococo" period even more lavish than the first. By the end of the 19th century the influence of impressionist and naturalistic styles began to be felt, with children and animals prominent among the smaller subjects. Special pieces were still turned out for special occasions, however, such as the carillon of 37 tunable bells produced in 1929 for the city's 1,000th anniversary (still on view in the Frauenkirche) or Paul Scheurich's Russian ballet figures, some of which were awarded the grand prize at the 1937 World Exposition in Paris.
Unlike nearby Dresden, Meissen was spared the bombing that devastated many German cities toward the end of World War II. The factory, though, was hit by artillery shells during the "liberation" of the town by Soviet troops in May 1945. However, production resumed later that month and with the establishment of the German Democratic Republic in 1949 it became a state-owned enterprise.
Exhibits from the decade following bespeak a grim era - mostly brown heads interspersed with such socially relevant themes as a worker with a jackhammer. Even the guidebook acknowledges that "little attention was paid at that time to the manufactory's traditions, and the highly developed technical and artistic skills of the staff were not yet fully used."
Happily the 1960s brought a reassessment and return to some of the traditions of the past. In the more recent exhibit cases subjects drawn from the "Arabian Nights" and Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" commingle with Picasso-ish clowns and figures of a Chagall-like imagination, as well as more abstract tea services and other modernistic designs.
Given those traditions, and a waiting world market, the Meissen factory was better prepared than most for the shift to capitalism that has taken place in recent years. According to museum director Hans Sonntag, even before the return to privatization orders were regularly received from all over the world, taking anywhere from one to eight years to fill.
For the most part, those are drawn from the 20,000 models stored at the factory. In fact the museum was originally called the "model hall," although its 2,500 pieces are only partly representative of the catalog as a whole. (The "blue-onion" pattern, for example, is available in 700 different forms.)
What is different is that, with the reunification of Germany and the attendant dissolution of the GDR, money that used to go to East Berlin now stays in Meissen, going directly for wages, machinery and materials. In addition both the factory and its products have the potential for much greater visibility on the international scene. In the last year alone, Sonntag tells us, he has traveled to Paris, Venice and parts of what used to be West Germany, where his son now lives.
He is also well-enough informed about the outside world to pick up on the "Salt Lake City, Utah" on my business card and remind us that Mormon educator Karl G. Maeser was born in Meissen, a fact commemorated by a plaque outside the latter's birthplace.
But what intrigues us for the present is the inside world - i.e., that of the factory - even if the closest we can get to it is the demonstration rooms. There at least one can see how Augustus' "white gold" is manufactured. And except for the gradual replacement of alabaster with feldspar, the process is remarkably unchanged since Boettger's day.
The kaolin, or china clay, is still mined nearby, before being washed and mixed with feldspar and quartz, to enhance transparency. That is now done in a blender, after which a filter press removes three-fourths of the water and the cake is mixed again to remove more of the air.
But the thrower's wheel is still propelled by foot, as the clay is molded by hand before being fired at 900 degrees. It is then glazed, then baked again at 1,450 degrees, during which process it shrinks by about 16 percent and the glaze becomes transparent.
The repairer does more than that name implies. He also assembles the figure, most of which are not made from a single mold. (Some pieces are composed of as many as 50 parts.) In addition he removes any irregularities, smoothes the molding seams and reworks the details, down to toes and fingernails on some of the smaller figures.
The painter's job is, in some ways, even more crucial. Mistakes in molding, for example, can be smoothed over. But a mistake in painting is impossible to correct, given the porous material of the porcelain itself. Uniformity in table-service patterns is obtained via tracing sheets, whose tiny holes are dusted with finely ground charcoal. The painting itself, however, is then done by hand - a steady one.
On-glaze painting, done after the first firing, is likewise executed by hand, without any tracing sheets. Rather the painter makes a pencil sketch of the design and paints over this. Interestingly, nearly all the on-glaze colors in use today are Hoeroldt's and are still the exclusive formulas of the Meissen factory, as they have been for more than 250 years.
The second firing sometimes alters these colors. The brilliant Meissen purple, for instance, begins as a dull brown before being burned in. Even more strikingly the "bright gold," with its 90 percent gold content, appears black before burning and must be polished with an agate pencil afterward to produce the shining gold effect. Finally a third baking, at 900 degrees, further fuses the colors with the glaze.
It's a fascinating process to witness, and all the more so when one sees the results. But even with the public accessibility, even with the guidebooks, even with a host as charming as Dr. Sonntag, it occurs to me that there is something else that hasn't changed. Through the better part of three centuries, through changing boundaries, changing governments and the eventual lifting of the iron curtain in this part of the world, Augustus' secrets are still safe.
That's one curtain that hasn't gone up, being protected by the crossed swords of Saxony and the traditions that have kept them as intact as the cobalt blue in which they are fired.