color
: green
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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. |