A Meissen porcelain teapot once owned by the mother of King George I, valued at more than three hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Photograph by REUTERS / Suzanne Plunkett / Landov

The man most often credited as the original creator of European porcelain was a German by the name of Johann Friedrich Böttger. He was an alchemist—he said that he knew how to turn lead into gold. Porcelain was white gold, valued for both its durability and its delicacy, and also prized for its exotic origins. Marco Polo first brought it to Europe, from China, in the fourteenth century: a small gray-green jar amid his bounty of silk brocades, spices, and vials of musky scents. Polo called it porcellana. It's a nickname in Italian for the cowry shell, whose shiny, white surface porcelain resembles. Their shape resembles the bellies of _porcellini--_or little pigs. Both words are sister to porcellina, a slightly different and slightly dirty word, and what a certain kind of man might call out at a woman as she walks down the street.* But then porcelain has always been part of a slightly dirty trade, one filled with piracy and pilfering.

It was only after the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese and the Dutch established their commercial trade routes to the Far East, that there emerged a robust market of export ware: porcelain exclusively made in China for Europe. Today, one can still marvel at the strange game of decorative, Orientalist telephone that this development created. A porcelain ewer has the seal of Portugal painted across its bulbous body in mild blue brushstrokes—except the seal is upside down. A Qing plate depicts Christ being baptized by John—with magnolia trees blossoming in the background. (Angels dance along the plate’s edge in a style more Fauvist than Biblical.) A wonky-eyed George Washington, whose jaw looks as if it has melted off in the kiln, stares at you from a gold-rimmed jug commissioned in the eighteen-twenties. Apparently, you put in your order and you hoped for the best.

Domestic manufacturing would have been cheaper, easier, and involved less breakage, fewer mistakes. But Europeans couldn’t figure out how to make porcelain at home. Marco Polo took a lazy guess, and for nearly five hundred years no one else had any better ideas. “The dishes are made of a crumbly earth or clay which is dug as though from a mine and stacked in huge mounds and then left for thirty or forty years exposed to wind, rain, and sun,” Polo wrote. “By this time the earth is so refined that dishes made of it are of an azure tint with a very brilliant sheen.” An account from 1550 suggested that “porcelain is likewise made of a certain juice which coalesces underground and is brought from the East.” In 1557, someone offered the more imaginative hypothesis that “eggshells and the shells of umbilical fish are pounded into dust which is then mingled with water and shaped into vases. These are then hidden underground. A hundred years later they are dug up, being considered finished, are put up for sale.”

None of this is completely accurate. Eggshells and fish shells would turn to ash. Porcelain is traditionally made from two essential ingredients: kaolin, also called china clay, a silicate mineral that gives porcelain its plasticity, its structure; and petunse, or pottery stone, which lends the ceramic its translucency and hardness. Kaolin is the more essential ingredient—a potter’s clay is meant to exist, like his glazes, in variations—and it takes its name from a mountain in Jingdezhen, China, where porcelain was first created, more than a thousand years ago, called Gaoling, which means “high ridge.” The name was recorded incorrectly by a Jesuit priest, Pere d’Entrecolles, in the early eighteenth century, in his letters home describing the Chinese technique. But in Europe, for centuries before d’Entrecolles’s observations, the arcanum of porcelain was considered impossible to unearth. The real story of how porcelain was invented—and then reinvented and reinvented again—is offered up in Edmund de Waal’s new book “The White Road: Journey into an Obsession,” a breathless pilgrimage to, and history of, three very famous white hills. The first is in Jingdezhen, still the porcelain capital of the world, where white vases will sit unpainted on planks of wood, the way they must have ages ago when orders were fulfilled for emperors. The second is in Meissen, Germany, where Böttger claimed his success and the first porcelain factory in Europe was established. (Queen Elizabeth II received a Meissen porcelain service as a wedding gift.) And the third is in Plymouth, England, where a thoughtful Quaker named William Cookworthy broke down the production ratio, and where the fine-china company Wedgwood was established. Your grandmother may have Wedgwood plates—if she does, they probably sit in the dining room, facing the covered table, painted with that signature soft periwinkle blue. They look a little like brightly frosted sugar cookies.

De Waal is a British potter, artist, writer, and obsessive. His last book, the best-selling “The Hare with the Amber Eyes,” told the history of five generations of his family through a collection of netsuke, or Japanese carved objects, that de Waal inherited from an eccentric great-uncle. De Waal is a master of telling stories through material objects. He can see a vase and not only imagine the kind of room it once inhabited but the type of woman who might have brushed her fingertips across its lip. When he writes about porcelain, you immediately understand that this is material made for a perfectionist:

Pinch a walnut-sized piece between thumb and forefingers until it is as thin as paper until the whorls of your fingers emerge. Keep pinching. It feels endless. You feel it will get thinner and thinner until it is as thin as a gold leaf and lifts into the air. And it feels clean. Your hands feel cleaner after you have used it. It feels white.

Working in porcelain takes patience as well as skill. The smallest amount of water can change its texture. If a bowl’s walls are inconsistent in thickness, the bowl can crack as it cools, because the ceramic must be vitrified at extremely high temperatures (somewhere between twenty-two hundred and twenty-six hundred degrees Fahrenheit; other clays can be fired a good couple of hundred degrees lower). “You can get away with unevenness with other kinds of clay, but it is chancy with porcelain. Your errors, your slapdash decisions, are revealed,” de Waal writes. But this risk of failure is worth the outcome of success: if made correctly, there is nothing thinner, no other clay that possesses that luminosity, that unbelievable strength. Tap a finished bowl with your spoon, and it rings hollow, like a metal cup. Glass shatters, earthenware crumbles; porcelain is otherworldly in its beauty and strength. A poem from the Tang dynasty describes a service of teacups for the emperor as “bright moons cunningly carved and dyed with spring water.”