Short Stuff: All About Porcelain

Summary

Stuff You Should Know: Short Stuff – All About Porcelain

Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant
Date: December 31, 2025

Episode Overview

This Short Stuff episode dives into the surprisingly fascinating history and science of porcelain. Josh and Chuck break down what makes porcelain unique, how it's made, its origins and journey from ancient China to Europe, and why it remains valuable and sought after today. As always, the hosts blend humor, curiosity, and clarity to turn a subject you may never have considered into something you'll be eager to talk about at your next dinner party.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

What Is Porcelain?

• Porcelain as a Ceramic

  • Porcelain is a specific type of ceramic, differentiated by its material density and higher firing temperatures, which make it uniquely durable and non-porous.
    • Chuck Bryant: "Porcelain clay has a much higher density and it's fired longer and at higher temperatures and... is much more durable, has very high performance characteristics." (01:53)
  • Despite its reputation for delicacy, porcelain is extremely tough—think of your toilet, which is made from porcelain.
    • Josh Clark: "Actually, I have lifetime experience with porcelain in the form of a toilet, but I hadn't really thought about that." (02:39)

• Natural Ingredients

  • Key ingredients: clay, quartz, feldspar, with kaolin clay being the desired premium ingredient.
    • Josh Clark: "The most common material that's used is called kaolin, which is a kind of clay that's almost white. And this is like the big money, porcelain clay." (03:18)
  • Kaolin clay yields the fine, white, non-permeable porcelain used for high-quality tableware.

• Firing Process

  • Firing temperatures go up to 2300°F (1260°C); the firing duration and materials used determine whether the porcelain is for toilets, mixing bowls, or fine china.
    • Chuck Bryant: "When we're talking firing temperatures ... it can go up to 2300 degrees Fahrenheit, about 1260 Celsius." (04:00)

• Unique Features

  • Some porcelains are translucent—light passes through them when held up to a light source.
    • Josh Clark: "You can hold porcelain up to a light... and you can see the silhouette of your hand on the other side of it." (04:19)

The Origin & Spread of Porcelain

• Chinese Invention and Perfection

  • Porcelain originated in China ~2,000 years ago during the Tang Dynasty, developing further during the Yuan Dynasty.
    • Chuck Bryant: "Originated in China about 2,000 years ago, during the Tang Dynasty. But it wasn't like the porcelain we know." (04:38)
  • Marco Polo's introduction of Chinese porcelain to Europe sparked a centuries-long European obsession.

• European “China Craze” and Innovation

  • For centuries, Europeans imported porcelain from China, not knowing how to replicate it; hence, the name “china” as a synonym for porcelain.

    • Josh Clark: "That's why a lot of porcelain tableware is called China, because it was kind of like the... Like champagne is the sparkling wine. China was the porcelain." (05:33)

  • It wasn't until the 18th century that Johann Friedrich Böttger, a German alchemist, cracked the code and Europeans could produce their own.

    • Chuck Bryant: "A German alchemist, Johann Friedrich Bootger. And he figured it out... in the 18th century." (06:00)

  • Kaolin clay was discovered in Cornwall, England in the 1770s, leading to widespread European production.

Hard Paste vs. Soft Paste Porcelain

• Chinese vs. European Styles
  • China traditionally produced “hard paste” porcelain—denser and less prone to chipping.
  • Europe often produced "soft paste" porcelain, which is a bit more fragile and prone to chipping.
    • Chuck Bryant: "The Europeans use that soft paste a little more, so it's a little more prone to chipping." (07:08)

Porcelain Production & Properties

• Glazing

  • Contrary to expectation, glazing is decorative, not functional; porcelain is already impermeable due to vitrification—a glassy phase formed during firing.
    • Chuck Bryant: "I thought the glazing might be kind of the final key to make it impermeable to liquids... But really has nothing to do with it. It's already impermeable. The glazing is just decorative." (07:31)
    • Josh Clark: "It's impermeable because it vitrifies... Like the glasslike materials become glass in it." (07:36)

• Bisque Porcelain

  • Unglazed porcelain is called “bisque”—a term the hosts humorously connect to seafood bisque.
    • Josh Clark: "Unglazed porcelain is called Bisque." (09:34)

• Porcelain Tile

  • Porcelain tiles are favored for their durability; cutting requires a tile saw or wet saw due to hardness.
    • Chuck Bryant: "If you're cutting porcelain tile, you're probably going to need a tile saw." (10:52)

Valuing and Collecting Porcelain

• Valuable Collectibles

  • Porcelain artifacts can be extremely valuable and long-lasting, with some Asian pieces fetching record auction prices.
    • Chuck Bryant: "The world auction record for Chinese porcelain was set ... when the Ma Yintang Chicken cup was sold for $36 million." (12:40)
  • Rarity and condition drive value; many prized items date to when porcelain reached peak quality but lower production, making extant pieces rare.

• Sustainability & Recycling

  • Porcelain is recyclable, but not via standard curbside. Specialized recycling is required, yet this quality heralds a sustainable future as circular economies develop.
    • Josh Clark: "It can also be recycled. But that is a real niche... You have to go seek out somebody who recycles it." (12:27)

• Bone China

  • English innovation involved adding bone ash (typically from farm animals) to create “bone china,” requiring lower firing temperatures but yielding a slightly less strong product.
    • Chuck Bryant: "Bone china ... that was something the English did, and that's actual bone... from farm animals, and it would really strengthen that stuff." (13:46)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the value of porcelain:
  • Chuck Bryant (12:40): "The Ma Yintang Chicken cup was sold for $36 million. And you know, why is anything valuable? It's because there's not many of them."
• On bone china’s origins:
  • Josh Clark (14:21): "There is no way that in the history of bone china, no psycho has made it with human bones."
  • Chuck Bryant: "Yeah, that’s a good point. Are you enjoying your coffee?" (14:27)
• On the durability of porcelain:
  • Josh Clark (02:39): "I have lifetime experience with porcelain in the form of a toilet, but I hadn't really thought about that."
• On European attempts to mimic China:
  • Josh Clark (05:33): "China was the porcelain. It took them quite a couple hundred years, I think, before they finally cracked the code."
• On the clarity of porcelain technology:
  • Chuck Bryant (07:31): "The glazing is just decorative."

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:37] – Episode introduction and Josh reveals this is the last episode of the year.
• [01:53] – Chuck describes porcelain’s fundamental qualities and durability.
• [03:00] – Josh describes the key composition of porcelain and introduces kaolin.
• [04:19] – Discovery that porcelain can be translucent.
• [04:38] – History: Porcelain’s Chinese roots and European adoption.
• [06:00] – German alchemist Böttger and the European breakthrough.
• [07:08] – Hard paste vs. soft paste; glazing myths.
• [09:34] – Bisque porcelain definition and discussion.
• [10:52] – Porcelain tiles and cutting methods.
• [12:40] – Porcelain value and record auctions.
• [13:46] – Bone china and its peculiar history.
• [14:21] – Joking about human bones in bone china.

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Tone & Style

Josh and Chuck maintain a light, conversational, and slightly irreverent tone while delivering tightly researched facts, interjecting personal anecdotes, jokes, and friendly banter that makes the subject matter approachable and memorable.

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Takeaways

• Porcelain, far from fragile, is an ancient, high-performance ceramic whose production and innovation have fascinated—and sometimes baffled—different cultures for millennia.
• The world of porcelain extends from your bathroom to multi-million dollar artifacts, and from art history to sustainability.
• As in many areas chronicled by Josh and Chuck, the histories of technology, culture, and commerce all come together in the story of one material you likely see every day—without giving it much thought.

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If porcelain piqued your curiosity, collect a new fact for your next trivia night—or maybe even spark a new hobby in antique china!

Transcript

[Podcast Host]

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[Chuck Bryant]

Guaranteed Human.

[Podcast Host]

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[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And it's just us, but it's Short Stuff and Chuck. This is the last episode of 2025.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

And that's it. That's all I had to say about that.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, well, let's talk porcelain, because porcelain isn't something I really knew much about until I did this research. And porcelain, as it turns out, you might know this, you might not, is a type of ceramic. It's a subset of ceramics. What they are both made of clay and they're both kiln fired. But porcelain clay has a much higher density and it's fired longer and at higher temperatures and Thusly is much more durable, has very high performance characteristics and it's, you know, porcelain is that super hard mixing bowl that you got from your grandmother that like you can't break. Well, you can break them, but just super hardy, super dense, non porous clay like material.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I guess I haven't had much experience with porcelain. Cause I always thought of it as very delicate and highly breakable. But apparently that's not true. And once I thought about it a little bit, it's like, actually I have lifetime experience with porcelain in the form of a toilet, but I hadn't really thought about that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, toilets. Yeah, they don't break.

[Josh Clark]

Try it. You can't do it. So there's three things that show up in any kind of porcelain and it's all natural. That's one of the big attractions of porcelain too. It's clay, quartz and feldspar, which is a kind of rocket that can form from all sorts of different stuff. And there's all sorts of other stuff you can throw in. But depending on the kind of porcelain that you come up with, it's basically dependent on the materials you use, the raw materials and then how high a temperature and how long you fire it for in the kiln. Those are the big variables that produce different kinds of porcelain. But probably the most common material that's used is called kaolin, which is a kind of clay that's almost white. And this is like the big money, porcelain clay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And that's usually going to be like that mixing bowl, like tableware is usually that kaolin. Very, very fine particle size. It's super durable like we were talking about, and not permeable by any liquid. Just try it again. And you know, when we're talking firing temperatures, we'll get to a couple of different kinds of porcelain, but it can go up to 2300 degrees Fahrenheit, about 1260 Celsi. And it kind of just depends on what you're making it for. Like is it a toilet or is it a mixing bowl or is it fine china?

[Josh Clark]

And one other thing about porcelain too, that I hadn't realized is that some kinds of it are translucent. And I was like, wait, that means kind of see through. And I looked up pictures of it and yes, you can hold porcelain up to a light like in your hand, and you can see the silhouette of your hand on the other side of it. Did you know that?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, because I've worked with porcelain tile where you can do that a lot of times. Floor tile can be porcelain, but this all Originated in China about 2,000 years ago, during the Tang Dynasty. But it wasn't like the porcelain we know. It was basically like, hey, we put out our fire, and they discovered this really hard, unbroken, solid pieces of stuff. And that was just rudimentary porcelain. Later in the Yuan dynasty, about 700, 800 years later, is when they really developed the porcelain as we know it. The porcelain that Marco Polo found and brought back to Europe. And they just went wild for this stuff.

[Josh Clark]

They did. And the market for porcelain opened up pretty quickly because trade routes were open thanks to Marco Polo. But the Europeans could not figure out how their Chinese friends were making this stuff. So all of the porcelain coming into Europe was foreign made, made in China. And that's why a lot of porcelain tableware is called China, because it was kind of like the. Like champagne is the sparkling wine. China was the porcelain. Right. And it took them quite a couple hundred years, I think, before they finally cracked the code. And it was an alchemist who figured out how to make porcelain by basically reverse engineering piece that he had from China. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

A German alchemist, Johann Friedrich Brutger. And he figured it out. This was in, I guess, the 18th century. And by the latter half of the 18th century, in the 1770s, they found that cowl and clay in Cornwall, England. And so the Brits were like, we can start making this stuff. Finally. We got the good stuff right here in Cornwall.

[Josh Clark]

Is it Kaolin? Like Shaolin?

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know.

[Josh Clark]

I like how you said it.

[Chuck Bryant]

How'd you say it?

[Josh Clark]

Kaolin. Kaolin or Regalin?

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know.

[Josh Clark]

So, yeah, so the Brits are like, great, we can put all this together, thanks to Bootger and Cornwall, and start making our own porcelain. And I'm not quite sure. I get the impression that China made its porcelain one of two ways. And the way that they mostly made their porcelain was through hard paste. And the other one is soft paste. And it has to do with the density of the raw materials you're using and then how high a temperature you fire it at and for how long. Like I was talking about before, these are basically the two types, two main categories of porcelain.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I think you're right. I think the Europeans use that soft paste a little more, so it's a little more prone to chipping. It's a little grainier, just not as hardy overall. And then you gotta glaze this stuff after you fire it. But the glazing, I thought, you know. Cause I didn't know anything about this stuff. I thought the glazing might be kind of the final key to make it impermeable to liquids.

[Josh Clark]

Me too.

[Chuck Bryant]

But really has nothing to do with it. It's already impermeable. The glazing is just decorative.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it's impermeable because it vitrifies. So like the glass, like materials become glass in it. So it's like kind of glassy. Really good porcelain is. So I say Chuck, we take a little break and come back and talk some more about porcelain. What do you think?

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's do it.

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[Josh Clark]

Foreign. Chuck I'd like to share something that I learned in our Dolls episode that I didn't have a chance to fit in, but now I do, because it seems like all of our episodes are now interlocking for some reason, but unglazed porcelain is called Bisque. Bisque. Okay, that was it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like B, I, S, Q U, E.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly like Tomato, shrimp, lobster. Lobster, that's the money one. Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Although a lot of times that stuff's langostino, you know.

[Josh Clark]

I didn't know that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, if you go to like a really high priced seafood restaurant, it'll be a real lobster, but that lango's a pretty good sub.

[Josh Clark]

Is that a rock lobster langostina?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I think it's just like a little tiny. A little tiny guy.

[Josh Clark]

Tastes like chicken.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, it looks like lobster meat, but it's. They're little, you know, it's like a shrimp size.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, I've seen those before.

[Chuck Bryant]

I've never seen a langostina, though, now that you mention it, I've never looked.

[Josh Clark]

That up, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's see what the creature looks like.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I'd like to see that too. I've only seen it dead. I think that's what grabs everyone's faces in Beetlejuice during the calypso scene.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, well, I mentioned earlier before the break about porcelain tile. It's very hardy tile for flooring or the wall. But if you're cutting porcelain tile, you're probably going to need a tile saw. We talked about wet saws before. They're wet because they are moving at such high speeds and drawing so much heat that the water cools off that blade. And there's a couple of ways you can actually form that tile. If it's up to like 4ft by 4ft, you basically have a special mold, but anything bigger than that and you're compacting it. Like just pressing layers and layers of ceramic powder until you get your desired size.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, with a big old machine, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

So there's a few reasons that people prize porcelain. For one, it can be really, really valuable, as we'll see. But also, like I said, it's an all natural material. Like a lot of the glazed colors that they use in glazing are like cobalt, iron oxide, copper. The raw materials are things like clay and feldspar. It's really easy to clean as you know with a toilet. Very resistant to mold and bacterial growth. As you know with the toilet, it's water resistant, you know, like a toilet is. It's good for foot traffic like a toilet. And it doesn't emit harmful substances like a toilet. It can also be recycled. But that is a real niche. I guess method or technique, like you can't just throw porcelain into your single stream. Recycling can. Yeah, you have to go seek out somebody who recycles it. But the very fact that it's Recyclable gives it kind of promise for the future as we get better and better at creating a circular economy.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. You mentioned how valuable it can be. The world auction record for Chinese porcelain was set about, I don't know, in 2014, when the Ma Yintang Chicken cup was sold for $36 million. And you know, why is anything valuable? It's because there's not many of them. It was crafted between 1465 and 87, when porcelain was just peaking at its quality, but they were producing the lowest amount of. So it's just super rare. So that's why it fetched 36 million.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. And that also points something out about porcelain, too, is if you take good care of it, it's so durable, it can last thousands of years, so. Or at least a thousand years, as far as we know. And there's like, people are into porcelain, like collecting tableware or vases or things like that. And so there's like a whole world out there available to you to get into bone, porcelain, hard paste, soft paste. Well, basically those kind. And if this thing floated your boat at all, I think good luck with your new hobby.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. I mean, you said bone porcelain. If you've ever heard bone china, that was something the English did, and that's actual bone. I think when they were sort of first searching out how to make this stuff, before they cracked the code, they would use, like, eggshell and stuff like that to no avail. And finally, they landed on actual human bone, ground down. Obviously, a very strong bone ash would be not from humans, apparently from farm animals, and it would really strengthen that stuff. And bone china, you don't have to fire as high. You can fire at lower temps. It's just not as strong.

[Josh Clark]

There is no way that in the history of bone china, no psycho has made it with human bones.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's a good point. Are you enjoying your coffee?

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. Oh, man. Chuck made me giggle. That means short stuff is out.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, wait a minute. Can we say goodbye for the year?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, wait, yeah. Yes. Thank you, Chuck. I say we do that, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Goodbye. No, we. In all seriousness, we want to thank everyone for another great year. Somehow here in year 17, we're enjoying things as much or more than we ever have, which is hard to believe and pretty wonderful for us. And, you know, big thanks to Dave and Ben and Jerry, of course, and. And everyone who contributes as writers. You know, Julia and Anna and Livia, Dave, Olivia, Dave and Kyle. I think that's everybody right now, right?

[Josh Clark]

It is.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. We can thank the Grabster for the old days even.

[Josh Clark]

There you go. He comes up and selects sometimes, too, doesn't he?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. So I just want to say thanks for everyone for keeping us employed in what's for me, the greatest job in the world means a lot.

[Josh Clark]

Agreed. I second Chuck. And yeah, thank you, everybody. Thanks for another great year. And we'll see you next year for another great year.

[Chuck Bryant]

And now, is Short Stuff out?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, Short Stuff is out.

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