260 Porcelain and Earthenware. 
durability and beauty. ‘The surface of this elegant material is fin- 
ished with a glazing made of burat alum—silex—and an alkali ob- 
tained from calcined lime and fern ashes; or with hoache which is 
a very white magnescian earth combined with pure silex.* 
* At King-te-ching, a disirict in the province of Kingsi, there are 
500 manufactories, which give employment to more than a million of 
artisans.” This will not seem incredible when it is considered, that 
such is the division of labor, that sixty hands are employed in com- 
pleting a single piece. 
Petuntse and Kaolin those celebrated materials for porcelain which 
are unrivalled and perhaps unequalled in other countries, are found 
in immense quarries of great depth, within twenty or thirty leauges of 
King-te-ching. Genuine Kaolin is totally infusible in the tremendous 
heat of the Chinese furnace, which easily melts the solid granite. 
The constituent parts of Kaolin are silex 52° alumine 42: oxide of iron 
0°33. The quarries of Alencon and St. Yrieux in France approxi- 
mate nearly to the Kaolin of China.t The colors and decorations 
upon the best Chinese porcelain are very superb, but the paintings 
are inferior in design to the European. { 
The porcelain tower at Nanking is an astonishing monument of 
the durability of this unparalleled manufacture. Itis of an octagonal 
shape consisting of nine stories, three hundred feet high, and is cov- 
- ered over its whole surface with the choicest porcelain. ‘This beauti- 
ful edifice has withstood the elements, and the changes of seasons 
for four hundred years, without alteration or injury. 
The Dresden China approaches nearest to the oriental, and in 
some respects excels all other European porcelains, resisting the pow- 
er of heat with greater obstinacy than any other. In compactness of 
texture, and infusibility, it is second only to the Chinese. It is not 
equally white with the best French, but is very splendid in its gilding, 
and painting, especially in miniature heads, and battle scenes, and 
generally in the taste and elegance of its forms. 
The Sevres royal establishment near Paris, surpasses, perhaps, 
even the Chinese, in the snowy whiteness of the ware, with the 
* Steatite, or soapstone—see Lardner’s Cyclopediew. article earthenware, &e. 
Steatite is much used by the porcelain manufacturers at Worcester, &c. in England, 
see Parkes. 
t Lardner’s Cyclopediz. 
+ The Chinese make inferior wares also, and by some it is said, the best is never 
suffered to go out of the Empire. 
