A Cup of Light Read Online Free
thousands of pots in there. Pots were the workhorses of her memory, the marching majority of its inhabitants. She loved adding to their number.
To do so she used the age-old method of maintaining an imaginary structure. Through history, mnemonists had done this, stored their memories in temples, palaces, or villas they kept in their minds. Lia had chosen the layout of the old imperial examination halls in Beijing, to which candidates once came from all over China to sit for the three-day exam of their lives. The complex had thousands of cubicles in orderly rows, the door to each marked with a different Chinese character. For her this was ideal. She could continue memorizing all her life and never use it all up. At its simplest level, the memory world was a repository of all she knew, indispensable in documenting the history of pots. But on a deeper level, where knowledge and imagination intersected, this world of brick-paved lanes and cubicles sometimes brought history to life so that she could actually see it unfolding. Whole scenes, events, lives played in front of her eyes. She didnât talk much about this to others. It was hers alone.
But now she needed to make only a surface visit to the memory world, for provenance on this Zhengde jar. She was quite sure it was genuine,
and
old. Therefore it had to have been recorded somewhere. And somewhere she would find it.
She sat down cross-legged on the floor to concentrate, her hands around the jar. She felt it through the pads of her fingers. Once connected to it she walked into memory in her mindâs eye. She saw herself passing through the wooden gates into the examination yard, walking down the central avenue where she kept all the reference lists and catalogs. If this underglaze blue-and-white jar was made during the Zhengde reign, chances were it was described, part of the Palace collection or some private inventory.
She found it in the middle section of the avenue, which housed the records of the Palace collection. The jar was listed in âGems of Porcelain,â a catalog of album paintings created for the Qianlong emperor in the eighteenth century. It was there, one of Qianlongâs choice pieces, the blue-and-white faux-Islamic jar.
A smile creased her face at that transient sense of completion brought on by a stroke of insight.
Listed in Qianlongâs âGems of Porcelainâ. . .
She finished the entry and replaced the jar in its silk-padded box. That was one. She returned it to its crate. Now another.
Standing over the big, old-fashioned wooden packing case, she dug through the shavings with the glee of a child. She could hardly wait for a sufficiently decent hour to call Zheng and tell him.
The ah chan, called Bai, walked in the new morning light through Tian Hua Tang Park in the town of Jingdezhen. The broad-leafed glade cast shadows on the lawn and the crossing cement paths. This was Jiangxi Province, in the rolling mountains of southeast China. Baiâs home was here, a small apartment on a gravel street up the hill. In that apartment he studied porcelain. The accumulated virtue of thousands of years of art was not easily known, but Bai believed that every hour of study paid him back tenfold in business success. It took a lot of knowledge to tell the real from the fake. And even in the realm of what was real, one had to have knowledge to successfully offer a small price for a quality article,
jia lian wu mei,
and resell high.
Bai walked the path down through the park, around the tree-shaded lake, and into downtown Jingdezhen, the center of Chinaâs porcelain world. For a thousand years this entrepôt of artists, potters, painters, and forgers had been home to the emperorâs kilns. Now the place was a mishmash of factories and artisans and backyard producers, a cobweb of ancient streets blaring TV sounds and tinny music and the pneumatic sputter of machinery.
Through the Communist era, the town had been dominated by huge
To do so she used the age-old method of maintaining an imaginary structure. Through history, mnemonists had done this, stored their memories in temples, palaces, or villas they kept in their minds. Lia had chosen the layout of the old imperial examination halls in Beijing, to which candidates once came from all over China to sit for the three-day exam of their lives. The complex had thousands of cubicles in orderly rows, the door to each marked with a different Chinese character. For her this was ideal. She could continue memorizing all her life and never use it all up. At its simplest level, the memory world was a repository of all she knew, indispensable in documenting the history of pots. But on a deeper level, where knowledge and imagination intersected, this world of brick-paved lanes and cubicles sometimes brought history to life so that she could actually see it unfolding. Whole scenes, events, lives played in front of her eyes. She didnât talk much about this to others. It was hers alone.
But now she needed to make only a surface visit to the memory world, for provenance on this Zhengde jar. She was quite sure it was genuine,
and
old. Therefore it had to have been recorded somewhere. And somewhere she would find it.
She sat down cross-legged on the floor to concentrate, her hands around the jar. She felt it through the pads of her fingers. Once connected to it she walked into memory in her mindâs eye. She saw herself passing through the wooden gates into the examination yard, walking down the central avenue where she kept all the reference lists and catalogs. If this underglaze blue-and-white jar was made during the Zhengde reign, chances were it was described, part of the Palace collection or some private inventory.
She found it in the middle section of the avenue, which housed the records of the Palace collection. The jar was listed in âGems of Porcelain,â a catalog of album paintings created for the Qianlong emperor in the eighteenth century. It was there, one of Qianlongâs choice pieces, the blue-and-white faux-Islamic jar.
A smile creased her face at that transient sense of completion brought on by a stroke of insight.
Listed in Qianlongâs âGems of Porcelainâ. . .
She finished the entry and replaced the jar in its silk-padded box. That was one. She returned it to its crate. Now another.
Standing over the big, old-fashioned wooden packing case, she dug through the shavings with the glee of a child. She could hardly wait for a sufficiently decent hour to call Zheng and tell him.
The ah chan, called Bai, walked in the new morning light through Tian Hua Tang Park in the town of Jingdezhen. The broad-leafed glade cast shadows on the lawn and the crossing cement paths. This was Jiangxi Province, in the rolling mountains of southeast China. Baiâs home was here, a small apartment on a gravel street up the hill. In that apartment he studied porcelain. The accumulated virtue of thousands of years of art was not easily known, but Bai believed that every hour of study paid him back tenfold in business success. It took a lot of knowledge to tell the real from the fake. And even in the realm of what was real, one had to have knowledge to successfully offer a small price for a quality article,
jia lian wu mei,
and resell high.
Bai walked the path down through the park, around the tree-shaded lake, and into downtown Jingdezhen, the center of Chinaâs porcelain world. For a thousand years this entrepôt of artists, potters, painters, and forgers had been home to the emperorâs kilns. Now the place was a mishmash of factories and artisans and backyard producers, a cobweb of ancient streets blaring TV sounds and tinny music and the pneumatic sputter of machinery.
Through the Communist era, the town had been dominated by huge
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