Almost every art had its legends of beauty. Jingdezhen's four local gazetteers recorded many such tales. One went like this: A porcelain merchant encountered danger at sea and drifted ashore on a desolate coast. While everyone else was busy repairing the leaking ship, he wandered idly along the shore and unexpectedly found many pieces of lapis lazuli among the pebbles. Thinking they would make suitable pigments for painting porcelain, he took a great deal of it back with him. The county gazetteer added, "The porcelain craftsmen had never used such wondrous, such pure blue. Later, the porcelain merchant and others returned to the shore where they had drifted after the shipwreck, but found nothing." That blue was never found again.
Few people knew how many processes a piece of porcelain had to undergo, or how many workers' hands it passed through before it was completed. Even those who casually drank tea from thin-bodied porcelain cups might not know. Of course, neither did Nick, because it was a secret, just as the Venetians guarded their glassmaking formulas on their island.
With such a large population, craftsmen's wages were kept very low, and many workers could be assigned to each stage of production. Even so, strict secrecy was impossible. For instance, Wang Jinsheng, an ink maker who had once worked in the ink shop run by Cao Sugong, not only learned the entire process but also developed ink-carving techniques. He replaced the ink molds originally used by the Cao family, and his craftsmanship was so exquisite that the ink itself became a work of art, eagerly sought by many. The ink from Antique Appreciation Studio became the most coveted, even surpassing that of the Cao family.
Labor costs in Europe were too high, so workers had now been replaced by machines. Yet