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Celadon

Céladon is the central figure in the pastoral romance-comedy-drama, L’Astrée—possibly the longest love story ever written—by the French novelist, Honoré d’ Urfé. Published between 1607 and 1627, it may be the most influential work of seventeenth-century French literature, partly for its length (six parts, forty stories, and sixty books in 5,399 pages), but also for its success throughout Europe.¹ The plot is complex, with scores of characters whose stories impact the young shepherd and shepherdess, Céladon and Astrée, in fifth-century France. (Perhaps the Outlander of its time—an epic tale of star-crossed lovers.) Widely translated throughout Europe, it was read in every royal court.

It is due to Céladon that we have a color of the same name. The popularity of the novel gave rise to stage plays and even a fashion for dressing in sylvan green à la Céladon.² The colors of woodland fog—misty grayish-greens—were so entrenched with the fictional character, Céladon, who even wore grayish-green ribbons and coat, that celadon became the name used to describe certain ceramics imported from the East. The Chinese were making these objects long before Urfé’s character appeared on the scene, but the beautiful pieces of misty greens, blues, grays, ochres, and blacks became known as celadon from that time.

There was once a celadon color so beautiful that only royalty were allowed to see it.³ The Chinese referred to it as mi se, meaning “mysterious color.” It was an imprecise color with no word to clearly describe it, so it is appropriate that it was called mi se. It was found only on special ceramic pottery. When fired, a glaze applied to the pottery transformed iron oxide from ferric to ferrous iron and caused a very fine crackle to develop on the greenish-grayish-bluish-brownish pottery. It was supposed to remind people of the imprecise beauty of jade. Although it was also a ceramic known as celadon, from the ninth century to the late twentieth century, people only speculated about the true color of mi se porcelain. They knew it was a sort-of green, but what shade of green, they had no idea.

Then, in 1987, an earthquake rocked Famen Temple near Xi’an, leaving half of it in ruins.  Archaeologists, while working to restore it, made an important discovery. There, in a secret underground room, they found fourteen pieces of Yue ware, a Chinese ceramic decorated with celadon glazing. Thirteen of the pieces, mostly plates and bowls, were true mi se porcelain, a special category of the finest celadon ceramics fired at the Yue Kiln from the ninth to the eleventh century.⁴ After that time, production of the secret-color wares was discontinued and, eventually, the secret formulas were forgotten.

Finally, in 1987, the world was to know the mysterious color. Experts determined that the mi se were different from most other celadon, both in appearance and chemical composition. To those of us who are untrained in ceramic ware, the color seems to be a little more olive than the gray-green we usually consider as celadon (think of a gray-green tube of Clinique makeup, then think of it as just a little more brown, and you have the color of  mi se—sort of, since all celadon is a range of color). Regardless, all celadon is beautiful.

Your leather furniture in Turncoat Celadon will have no one guessing as to its color—they’ll just call it beautiful.