Color: A Natural History of the Palette (37 page)

I remembered hearing a story about this green color from a Buddhist monk in Ladakh in India, many years ago when I was a teenager. Manlio Brusatin told a similar story in his wonderful book,
The History of Colour
, although his ended differently, and much more sadly, with madness. I prefer the monk’s version, which has always stayed with me as a parable of meditation.

We sat in the half-dark drinking salty tea, and he talked about how a deity appeared to a boy in a dream. “I can tell you,” the deity said, “how to find everything you want in the world: riches, friends, power. Even wisdom.” “How can I do that?” asked the boy, eagerly. It is easy, he was told. All you need to do is close your eyes and not think about the color sea green. The boy confidently closed his eyes, but his thoughts were full of waves and jade and the sky on a misty morning. He tried to think of red, or of trumpets, or of the wind in the trees, but the sea kept flowing into his mind like a tide. Over the years, remembering his dream, he would often sit quietly and try not to think of green. But he never quite succeeded. And then one day, when he was an old man, he did it: he sat for a long time without even a flicker of color in his thoughts. And he opened his eyes and smiled—and when my monk friend got to this point, he opened his own eyes and smiled. “He smiled,” said the monk, “because he realized he already had everything he wanted in the world.”

The Famen museum was about to close, and the security guard had packed away his red flag and was back at his post, making sure nobody took photographs. It was a curious thought that—except perhaps for Yizong, but probably not even him—this young man and his colleagues had spent more time with the emperor’s porcelain than anybody else ever had. He lived with these bowls and with this delicate ritual bottle. Perhaps he had the answer I was looking for. Did he like the
mi se
porcelain? I asked. “Me?” he asked in surprise. “Yes, you.” He smiled, a little self-consciously. “In the beginning I didn’t,” he said. “In the Chinese tradition everyone likes gold and silver. So naturally I liked that stuff over there much better, and thought this was nothing.” And he pointed to the other side of the room, full of the exquisite precious metalwork that twenty minutes earlier I had admired on demand for the cameras.

“But then,” continued the young guard, whose name was Bai Chongjui, “after about six months I began to realize that perhaps I was wrong. I began to think this
mi se
was even more valuable than the gold and silver.” What did he mean? “I mean that the gold is so common. And that this celadon is so simple, it’s about nature and harmony.” Bai was twenty, he had worked in that room for two years, and I am sure he was right. When I looked again at the brown-green porcelain, sitting mysteriously in its display cabinets, I could for the first time properly understand its appeal.

Imagine you are an emperor, dusted with gold, surrounded by silks, held high on palanquins, fed the most exquisite foods with jade chopsticks. Everything precious. Would you not then yearn for something earthy and real? When you can have almost anything, it is human nature to want what you are in danger of losing. And in the case of the Tang elite that scarce commodity was simplicity. The rulers of the Tang would have been brought up on a wonderful combination of cosmologies. Buddhism would have taught ideas of change and fading as signs of the temporal and temporary nature of all existence. But this would have been fused as well with a little Daoist lore, where the green but hazy mountains symbolized the pureness of nature and the possibility of immortality. So this fading, autumnal green—hazy yet hinting at a return to nature—may have seemed like the very embodiment of simplicity and also of integrity. Its blandness, to a sated appetite, would have been like a sorbet to the glutted palette.

One of the miracles of celadon is that it all comes from the mountains—from their earth and their forests. The wood was used for firing, of course, and the clay was used for the body of the porcelain. But the two together—as wood ash and kaolin—were also used for the glaze that makes up its delicate skin and jade-like color. A few days after leaving Famen, I realized what the relic and its offering were about. The finger—of a man who taught about the impermanence of things—was a reminder of the nature of illusion. And the olive green of
mi se
was (rather as in the story I learned about the first Buddhist art during my quest for yellow) a reminder of the illusion of nature.

THE SECRETS OF CELADON

There was “secret celadon” but there were also the secrets
of
celadon. Perhaps it was nothing more than an astonishingly successful early advertising campaign, or perhaps the market genuinely believed it; either way, celadon was for centuries thought to have secret, almost magical powers. In Southeast Asia, for example, the best Chinese jars were believed to be sorcerers—nature embodied in clay to the extent that it could be tempted out as a djinn. The best jars had to be able to “talk,” or at least to give a clear ringing sound when struck, and if they gave a good tone then people would consider them to be the homes of gods. In Borneo a jar owned by the Sultan was supposed to have the power of prophecy, and to have “howled dolefully” on the night before his wife died. And on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, there were famous talking jars with their own names and characters. The most famous was called Magsawi and was believed to go off on long journeys on its own, particularly to see its girlfriend, a female talking jar on the island of Ilocos Norte. Legend had it that they had a baby together: a little talking jar, or perhaps at first a little screaming jar.
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The Central Asian buyers had quite a different reason for wanting these bowls, and wanting them badly. It was nothing to do with djinns, but it was more pragmatically because celadon was believed to have the potential to save its owner’s life. The shelves of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul are full of hundreds of pieces of celadon collected by the Turkish rulers ever since they took Constantinople in 1453. According to Islamic expert Michael Rogers,
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the most likely explanation for this collecting mania is because the Muslims believed the bowls were “alexipharmic”—meaning that they acted as an antidote to poison. “Where the idea came from I do not know, but I am inclined to suspect that the Ottomans got the idea from Europe,” he told me. He had heard of an experiment conducted by the Mughal emperor Jahangir in the early 1700s. According to his memoirs, Jahangir arranged for two condemned criminals to be fed poisoned food: one ate off celadon and one off another kind of dish. “And of course both died,” Professor Rogers added.

Interestingly, the mysterious myth of poison detection lives on, but with completely different-colored porcelain. A few months later I was browsing through the eclectic Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford when I came across a jolly reddish-brown teapot. It was just like ones I had seen being sold in antiques shops in Kabul and Peshawar, and had wondered about, because they looked so out of place. No wonder: it turned out they were made by an Englishman, living in Moscow. Francis Gardner had moved to Russia in 1766 and, finding his pots were much sought after by the Russian nobility, he stayed to make his fortune. After 1850 Gardner-ware was exported in huge quantities, especially to Asia, where it is still highly prized. According to the label: It is widely believed in Central Asia that this porcelain protects the family, as any poisoned food placed in a Gardner bowl will instantly break it.

THE POISONER RETURNS

Earlier that day in Oxford I had tried to find the oldest piece of porcelain recorded in the British Isles. It was owned by Archbishop Warham and was apparently held at his alma mater, New College. I learned about it from a book
⁸
published in 1896, which had described the cup as the “sea green or celadon kind,” and I was curious to see it. It was the college holidays, but I paid a small entrance fee, and wandered in. William Warham was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1504 to 1532. There is a portrait of him in the New College dining room—a sad-looking man with bags under his eyes. Behind him are rich fabrics that seem to have been brought from the East; but there is no sign of a sea-green cup. I asked the friendly guardian at the college gate—who had been a porter for sixteen years and now was semiretired, he told me—whether he knew of the cup, and he said he did not. I admitted that the book in which I had read about it was more than a hundred years old. “I don’t think it matters,” he said. “Once we have something in the college we don’t let it go.” He gave me the address of the archivist, and I wrote to her.

The porter had been right: they still had the Warham cup, she confirmed, and sent a photograph that had been taken recently for insurance purposes. It was exquisite: so marine green that it was almost the color of seaweed, although it was mounted in a rather elaborate late medieval gold support which made it seem slightly clumsy. The compiler of the original inventory that had recorded it in 1516 had no idea how to categorize it—he had never seen anything like it before—and eventually settled on describing it as “lapis,” the Latin for stone.

As for Archbishop Warham, he was a leading British diplomat, negotiating such tricky matters as the marriage of Catherine of Aragon to Prince Arthur. With the Medicis in Italy and the Ottoman Empire rising on the ashes of the Byzantines, it was an alarming, exciting time for negotiators in Europe: indeed, it was the most corrupt, murderous time that Europe has probably ever seen. No wonder Warham looked worn out in his portrait. As a diplomat in those difficult times he would certainly have had a taster for official dinners, and it was plausible that someone, having heard the alexipharmic story, would one day have given the good clergyman a celadon cup out of gratitude for diplomatic services rendered. The New College “legend” suggests that person may have been Archduke Ferdinand, who was supported by Warham after being shipwrecked off Dorset in 1506. If the Archduke believed the stories about celadon he may well have heard from farther east, then the modern equivalent of his gift would perhaps be an exquisitely tailored, almost invisible, bullet-proof vest.

Asian art objects had begun to arrive in Europe much earlier than Warham’s cup—at least since the Crusaders began bringing them home in the Middle Ages, and perhaps even since the Vikings. But when the trade routes began to really open up in the early 1600s, the “Orient” soon became the rage among the drawing rooms of Paris, London and Moscow. It didn’t seem to matter whether fabrics and objects and patterns came from India or Persia, China or Japan. The difference between Asian cultures was somewhat of a blur anyway and, on European-made chinoiserie wallpapers, it was common to see Islamic trees of life with Chinese birds perching colorfully in their branches.

Green was associated with Indian mysticism, Persian poems and Buddhist paintings, and became even more popular after the Romantic period began in the 1790s, with poets like William Wordsworth reflecting the general feeling that nature was suddenly something wondrous rather than dangerous, and that, in all ways, Green was Good. But in terms of paint at least, this sentiment was to prove fatally wrong.

Chatsworth House in Derbyshire contains a striking example of how popular the color was—in a suite named after a doomed celebrity royal who stayed there seven times while under house arrest. The “Mary Queen of Scots” rooms were last seriously decorated in the 1830s by the 6th Duke of Devonshire, remembered as “the bachelor Duke” and known not only for his foppish obsession with things being stylish but for his tireless energy in making them so. One of the leading architects of the day, Sir Jeffrey Wyattville, oversaw the redecoration, and the result showcased very late Regency fashion. All but one of the seven rooms are green, which gives the sense of walking through an exotic forest: boudoirs in the wilderness. The most striking are the hand-painted Chinese wallpapers—green tendrils creeping up the walls with extra birds, flowers and even a special banana tree pasted on top. Wallpapers from China had first been pressed onto English walls in 1650: it is extraordinary that they were still sufficiently in vogue 180 years later to suit the tastes of the fussy bachelor duke—although his timing was impeccable. In 1712 Parliament had introduced a tax on wallpapers, intending to use the money for the War of the Spanish Succession. It was not repealed until 1836—just when the duke began redecorating.
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These were the Duke of Wellington’s rooms when he stayed as a houseguest, and they contain a portrait of Wellington’s arch-rival Napoleon, painted by Benjamin Haydon. We see Bonaparte from behind, his hands clasped behind his back in agitation as he gazes out to sea. No wonder he was upset: he had just lost an empire. His mood would not have been helped at all by the interior decoration in his own house on St. Helena in the remote Atlantic, where he died. It may not have killed him—quite—but the green wallpaper in Napoleon’s bedroom at Longwood House certainly helped to drive him to his deathbed.

The rules of relics are perplexing. It is, for example, perfectly acceptable to lop off a digit from the Buddha’s dead body, and even to pass what is claimed to be the Messiah’s foreskin down generations of Church elders. Yet to consider doing anything like that with the mortal remains of those whom we have loved more closely would be seen in most of the world as barbaric: fingers and skulls of ancestors have to be kept with the rest of them. But there is one very acceptable relic that in the nineteenth century anyone could usually claim from the body of the deceased: a lock of hair, to keep in a little box and look at sometimes, wondering whether the person’s charisma might be lingering in the keratin.

Within a few years of Napoleon Bonaparte’s death in 1821 (at the age of fifty-one) locks labelled “Bonaparte’s hair” (which his doctor incidentally reported at the time of his death as “thin, fine and silky”) commanded quite a price on the open market. But it was not until 140 years later that one of them caused a mild sensation. After being bought at auction in 1960 it was chemically analyzed. The new owners were looking for any clue to greatness, perhaps. But what they found instead was a clue to the fall of greatness. They found arsenic, and in substantial quantities. Which led to a spate of questions. Did the ex-emperor really die of cancer, as his doctors had declared, or did something more sinister happen during his six years of exile after he lost at Waterloo?