Porcelain clay is still today shaped in all possibly ways. It is cut, molded, thrown on potter's wheel and hand sculpted with or without the help of machines. As a westerner we are apt to think that porcelain clay should behave as ordinary pottery clay. On the contrary Chinese porcelain clay - or paste - is rather "short" and unplastic even if some clays are more suited for throwing than other.

It was therefore for me an unexpected insight, that in traditional porcelain manufacturing the Chinese potter is not throwing the piece to its final shape as with pottery. Instead they only throw a rather thick and clumsy looking raw piece while checking the measurement with a stick, a task that will take only a few seconds. To fill a wooden plank with up to twenty raw, seemingly identical pieces is a matter of minutes for a skilled porcelain potter. In this way plank after plank is filled with pieces then after this is left to dry under the open straw clad roofs of the porcelain pavilions. Finally when dry and in a "leather hard" state they are again put on a wheel and cut to it's final shape with a steel blade. I guess the early tool for this might have been a sharp piece of bamboo. The final that is done is the hollowing out of the foot, adding of the mark, previously the imperial reign mark, and a final coat of glaze inside the foot rim. There must have been variations of this though, but that discussion will have to wait.

It was also a surprise for me to se how much clay that actually is cut away during the turning process. A rough piece can be as much as ten to twenty times as thick as the final piece. Because of this one important part of the work is to wet, clean and prepare the clay shreds for reusing. In this way an important side effect is achieved. If we guess that as much as 95 percent of the clay from one piece goes into the making of the next the clay body properties will be kept practically unchanged from one piece to the next. The importance of this is evident when you consider that several thousands of pieces will be fired at the same time. One can easily imagine what a nightmare it would be to try to fire a kiln loaded with tens of thousands of pieces melting at different temperatures.

In mounds of wet clay I could see bricks sticking up like sprouts to extract moisture, a technique described as early as by Pere de Entrecolle in 1712.