Hunt for White Gold

Chapter One





It was said that the secret was in the clay. It had to be. Either that or it was something arcane, magical, like the mystery of silk centuries before. Yet that mystery had turned out to be something mundane, something natural. Stolen silk-worm eggs smuggled out by two priests in their hollow canes had brought it to the world.

The Chinese ware would turn out to be the same. It had to be. And if one man could make it, as with the silk, as with the miracle of gunpowder even before that, so another man could steal it.

La Société de Jésus had embedded itself comfortably within Chinese society under the Qing. Emperor Kangxi in his wisdom had welcomed the trade vessels of the West with open arms. In a few short years Chinese goods had become the elite fashion throughout Europe and, almost in exchange, the Jesuits insinuated themselves as premiere ambassadors for the Western world.

A decade hence and they had become trusted astronomers and mathematicians within the Qing court, allowed to translate even sacred Confucian texts and to present in Europe that comparatively naïve faith as a credible religion, despite the Jesuits’ initial abhorrence of the Chinese worship of ancestors and evidently idolatrous ways.

One of these Jesuits, adorned in Chinese robes, a custom his fellow priests had adapted to over the years, bowed his way into the heartland of Kangxi porcelain, Jingdezhen, and thus became the first European to witness in action the last great Chinese mystery: the production and art of the true hard-paste porcelain, the exquisite tableware that had since become the ‘White Gold’ of Europe.

And he noted it all.

The nations of Europe – rich Europe, peaceful Europe – had in the blink of history’s eye become infatuated with the luxuries offered by the New World.

Chocolate, once the heavenly delight only of Royal Spain, now poured, albeit still expensively, alongside coffee and tea in the new trade of gentlemen’s clubs springing up all over London.

Whether a Tory or a Whig, depending on how far one walked up St James there would be a chocolate shop where, it was noted, ‘the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers,’ or conspired to wheedle some advantage from the king’s extended absence from the country.

And, once all of Europe had developed its taste for the hot beverages of the New World, the demand for cool elegant ‘chinaware’ spread from the drawing rooms of royalty along the cobbled streets of Europe’s cities to the coffee and chocolate houses.

In 1710, through science, effort and luck, the Margravate of Meissen in Germany began to produce its own miracle hard-paste porcelain. Although inferior to the Chinese, the clamour for it rang around the world like the porcelain bells of its Frauenkirche, the chime of Saxony’s cups and serving pots mocking the French and English attempts to mimic the cool chinaware that had captivated the world.

Hot beverages had become the mark of civilisation. Chocolate prolonged life and raised virility; coffee stimulated the brain and heart and was exotic beyond diamonds as if it had come from another universe. These new commodities were traded far and above the old-hat of hops and cloth, and so fortunes were made and companies born that would outlast empires.

But these glorious luxuries all suffered from the same drawback. To savour and appreciate them fully they must be hot – too hot to be served in silver or pewter or gold. The table-services of kings were now simply an embarrassment to their guests and no matter how determined English and French potters became, the chinaware could be but poorly imitated.

One English potter affirmed that the clay that held the secret to the coolness of porcelain could be obtained in the Americas for he had discovered native wares that possessed the same properties. The South Seas Company declined his offer to invest in further explorations.


In 1712, Father d’Entrecolles wrote his first letter to Father Orry in Paris describing the full process, the firing and mixing of both soft-paste and hard-paste Chinese porcelain. The letter failed to make it out of China, but rumours abounded that the secret had been broached. The first letter soon became more valuable than the product whose manufacture it described. Father d’Entrecolles disappeared back into his missionary order and did not write again to his ministry for eight years. Any country or individual that could rediscover the first letter of Father d’Entrecolles would hold the secret of the first great industrialised product of the eighteenth century.




Captain William Guinneys successfully purchased the first letter of Father d’Entrecolles from Wu Qua of the Foreign Trade Hongs for sale to a man, known only as Ignatius, in the American colonies. The transaction completed, Guinneys began an ocean voyage as wide as his bumptious smirk.

Whilst Guinneys’ creditors in London mopped their brows in relief, the general hunt for the letter forced Ignatius to spirit it away to a secret location for safekeeping. He entrusted pirates with this task, believing they must surely have no interest in the ways of men beyond the lining of their purses

He charged a pirate captain, one Black Sam Bellamy named for his flowing mane of black hair, to carry the letters north, sealed in a greying, bronze Chinese cannon wisely chosen by Guinneys as fitting concealment.

But the device was not enough to hide the letters from the vengeful Chinese gods.

A storm off the Cape Cod coast – a maelstrom from nowhere – drowned Bellamy and sank his ship, the Whydah Galley. It was April 1717 and the letters were lost again, the Gods satisfied. For a time.

William Guinneys, his task completed, his pockets sufficiently full to banish worry about his peacetime deduct or the black-coated and black-hearted men in Leadenhall Street ruling the waves with their vellum and ink, continued his waltz back and forth from the Chinese and Indian factories and awaited war to speed him from the doldrums of the Company ledgers.

Two years later, his first and last experience of action was ended with cutlass and powder. Not by Spaniards or Frenchmen, as his heart would have wished, but by a jumped-up boot-wipe turned pirate captain. The pirate Devlin was his executioner.


Guinneys told no-one of the letter. There was no need; the letter spoke for itself.

But first it had to become known again.