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color : green

winter green of the San Bruno Mountain, California

There was once in China a secret color. It was so secret that it was said only royalty could own it. It was found on a very special kind of porcelain, which was called mi se, pronoun-ced "mee-ser", and meaning "mysterious color". During the ninth and tenth centuries when it was made, and for hun-dreds of years afterwards, people would wonder what it looked like, and why it was such a secret. They new it was a shade of green but more than that they could only speculate.

Sometimes, over the centuries, robbers - or foreign archaeo-logists - would raid graves, and a few weeks later greenish bowls would appear in the world's antiques shops with the confident claim that this was true mi se. But it was not until 1987, when a secret chamber of treasures was discovered in the ruins of a collapsed tower, together with a full inventory carved in stone, that scholars knew for sure they had found some genuine examples of this legendary porcelain.

When I first heard about this secret porcelain, I tried to imagine what it was like. At first I wanted it to be the misty color of the sea at dawn ... but then I saw a rather smudgy picture of mi se in a museum art catalogue ... it looked dirty, olive brown, nothing special at all. It had seemed to be about the colors I hadn't been attracted to: the non-colors, which can best be described conceptually or meteorologically, with words like misty, dreamy, ghostly, pale, foggy. But then I began to love them, to love their delicacy and to enjoy tracing the patterns - of dragons or phoenixes or lotuses - that some of the porcelain-makers incised into their underglaze, so you can just see them if you swivel them against a light.

The Famen mi se comes from the Shanglinhu kiln in the mountains of Zhejiang province south of Shanghai, where both the clay and the workmanship are considered particu-larly fine. The color comes from a small amount of iron: the more iron the more green. Most celadons are made from a glaze with about 2 percent iron; mi se has about 3 percent.

winter green of the San Bruno Mountain, California

Victoria Finlay: Color, A natural history of the palette, Random House, New York, 2004.

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