Porcelain and Alchemy

Hey dear Hive community, first of all I would like to welcome you all to my new post and hope you had a day that was full of positive experiences! Today I would like to talk a little about alchemy and hope you are able to expand your knowledge.

You can see some porcelain works of art here and in the past I have already gone into more detail about the general history of porcelain and specifically I would like to discuss the connections to alchemy. Who was the exact inventor of the porcelain is often controversial to this day, but it is assumed that it were alchemists from ancient China who made the recipe during the 7th century during the Tang Dynasty and over a longer period of time the recipe was more and more adapted and of course kept strictly secret so that no one was able to reproduce original Chinese porcelain. The production of the various pigments for painting are also counted to alchemical processes and during the Ming Dynasty it came to the fact that more and more techniques were created and with the arrival in Europe the recipe was kept strictly secret and people were instructed to import it and today it is known that the Chinese used quartz, feldspar and kaolin for the production which has been burned several times with different temperatures. In Europe, many people tried to find the recipe for production in order to make themselves independent of trade with China and at the beginning of the 18th century, the German alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger (1682 - 1719) who had worked at the court of Augustus II the Strong (1670 - 1733) managed to decipher the recipe and it did not take long until the first manufactory in Meissen was built in 1710 and production was started more and more. It is assumed that Böttger came to the recipe at that time during experiments on the artificial production of gold and in old writings it is even said that he would have come as a gift to a substance with which it was possible to produce gold artificially. His attempts were often under strong pressure at that time and he even often played with the idea of fleeing from the court and he had to carry out his experiments in the cellar and August the Strong made sure that he was very well protected because others also knew of his knowledge and wanted to bring him into the own power. If you would like to know more about alchemy in China in general, I can recommend this post here where I have already gone into more detail about this important this topic.

Thanks a lot for stopping by and I hope you could learn something new about alchemy! I captured these pictures with my Camera Sony Alpha 6000 plus 55-210 mm lens.