Color: A Natural History of the Palette (35 page)

In another part of the warehouse was a long room, with thirty women working quietly at a table, separating stigmas from stamens. This was the second sorting and perhaps partly explained why my jar of Iranian saffron is purer and redder than the Spanish—more hands have touched it to make sure it is pure. Saffron is a big seller in the Arab states. “They eat it for strength, particularly during Ramadan,” Ali said. The traditional month of fasting between sunrise and sunset demands some serious high-energy eating at nightfall. “Sometimes they put ten or even twenty grams of saffron in a big samovar, and add sugar and hot water. I can’t drink it and they laugh at me and say I am the King of Saffron and yet I’m not even strong enough to drink it.” Actually, he continued, “Arabs say that saffron is good for . . .” and he paused a little awkwardly. “Sex?” I asked, forgetting to be Islamically demure. “Er, yes,” he said.

The theory that saffron is an aphrodisiac dates from thousands of years ago: the hetaerae courtesans of ancient Greece used to strew it around their bedchambers; Cleopatra apparently used to bathe in saffron before inviting a man to her divan, believing that it would stimulate the appropriate bits. History does not relate what the men thought of the color of her skin afterward, but it does relate the recipe, which is approximately 10 grams of saffron per warm love-bath. During a particularly orgiastic Roman feast, satirized by Nero’s entertainment director Gaius Petronius in his outrageous book
Satyrikon
, the guests had scarcely stopped laughing at the rude table decorations when the dessert arrived, and to their snorts of suggestive delight, “all the cakes and all the fruits, when touched ever so slightly, began to squirt out saffron.” But this most sexy of spices, made with a flower’s reproductive organs, and smelling of a Greek prostitute’s boudoir, has a curious secret. It is sterile. Those red spikes make all the boasts but they don’t actually work. The saffron crocus has to be planted by hand from corms.

PURPLE MANTLES

Ali’s fields were not yet ready, but there were plenty of flowers at a town called Torbat, 150 kilometers south of Mashhad, he said. So with the help of a young chemistry graduate called Mohammed-Reza, I arranged to go there the next morning. And as we drove through a desert scattered with jagged hills, I wondered what I would see. Would it be Ebrahim’s vision or would it be Ali’s? Ancient or modern? It turned out, of course, that it was both.

We got to Torbat soon after six o’clock and turned off the market street into an area with high cream-colored walls and closed doors. We stopped at one and a young man opened it—he was expecting us—and behind him stood his wife, with her head covered. Mohammed-Reza might be one of her husband’s oldest friends but he wasn’t family, and family was strict. Mahsoud and his wife Nazanin were first cousins, Nazanin explained in excellent English as we breakfasted on flat bread and cheese and halva. They had been promised to each other early, and had inherited farmland from Mahsoud’s late father: it was a way of two strands of the saffron family being joined together. We piled into Mahsoud’s Peugeot and headed out into the countryside. It was dotted with high-walled enclosures that looked like cemeteries, but which Mahsoud assured me were saffron fields. His own crop would not be ready for another week, but instead he would take me to the field of a local farmer, Gholam Reza Eteghardi. Would it be a mantle, I kept wondering, or a handkerchief?

It was—in my purple square accessory reckoning—a small paper tissue. But what was wonderful was how many other purple tissues it was surrounded by. These fields were smaller than those in Spain: perhaps 25 meters by 10. But there were hundreds of them, stretching out to the distance, the mauve flatness of the scene broken up by almond trees—the farmers’ other crop. If it was a mantle, it was a patchwork one. But with Mahsoud’s help I did some calculations. All the Iranian crocus fields, if laid out together, are not as big as Holland, but they must be about the same size as Amsterdam, and I was not disappointed.

We drank tea and ate pomegranates, and I talked to some of the crocus pickers. Mehri Niknam was thirty. She had been a hired laborer for just five or six years, but she knew the business well. It was important in her village and she’d been picking crocuses for the neighbors since she was a child. She used saffron in the kitchen, “like everyone else—for making
shalazar
.” This is one of Iran’s truly democratic dishes—a rice pudding made with sugar, rose water, almonds and, of course, saffron. It is made in every kitchen in the country, whether the family is rich or poor.

I looked around: I had waited so long to be there. There were the purple fields and the women in scarves that I had imagined, but there also was Mahsoud, standing up in the field hunched over his mobile phone. The Spaniards had that mixture of modernity and tradition too, of course, but for me, oddly, the difference between the two approaches was encapsulated in the way that they dealt with mice. Do you use chillies? I asked, remembering what I had heard in Spain, and drawing a little picture in my notebook just for clarification. “Oh no,” Mahsoud said. “We stop up the hole of the mouse and then fill it with motorcycle smoke. It is very efficient.”

We sped back to Mashhad that afternoon through the low mountains, past villages that were the same uniform beige as the surrounding desert. And there, at a place on the road where we could not safely stop, I saw just for a few seconds the actuality of my romantic vision of ancient Persian saffron. Three women were crouching in a violet field; behind them, in a timeless scene, were two boys racing gray donkeys toward a mud-brick village as the sun disappeared behind hills. The flowers they were picking would not give the best spice—it was late in the day—but they could not afford to waste their precious cash crop by waiting until the following dawn.

7

Green

“Carving the light from the moon to dye the mountain stream.”

XU YIN, Five Dynasties poet, talking about mi se

“It’s not easy bein’ green.”

KERMIT, Sesame Street frog puppet, singing about identity

There was once in China a secret color. It was so secret that it was said only royalty could own it. It was found on a very special kind of porcelain,
¹
which was called mi se, pronounced “meeser,” and meaning “mysterious color.” During the ninth and tenth centuries when it was made, and for hundreds of years afterward, people would wonder what it looked like, and why it was such a secret. They knew it was a shade of green but more than that they could only speculate.

Sometimes, over the centuries, robbers—or foreign archaeologists—would raid graves, and a few weeks later greenish bowls would appear in the world’s antiques shops with the confident claim that this was true
mi se
. And then sometimes other, slightly more responsible, archaeologists would excavate different tombs, and a few years later other green bowls would appear in the display cabinets of the world’s art museums, with the cautious speculation that this
might
be true
mi se
. But it was not until 1987, when a secret chamber of treasures was discovered in the ruins of a collapsed tower, together with a full inventory carved in stone, that scholars knew for sure they had found some genuine examples of this legendary porcelain. On the day that the emperor had donated them eleven centuries earlier they had been locked away. And they had been hidden ever since.

When I first heard about this secret porcelain, I tried to imagine what it was like. At first I wanted it to be the misty color of the sea at dawn. I had wanted “mysterious” to denote something filmy and soul-like, suggesting something that was just out of sight, rather like the half-visible designs of dragons you sometimes find carved into some of the non-mysterious kinds of green Chinese porcelain. And then later, when I read that it was a darker color than normal, I fondly imagined this special porcelain to be like bright jadeite, with the luster of emeralds. But then I saw a rather smudgy picture of
mi se
in a museum art catalogue and I prepared myself to be disappointed. It looked dirty, olive brown, nothing special at all.

My idea for my journey shifted. It was not, I realized, simply going to be about seeing a national treasure in a display case and enjoying its direct appeal. Instead it was going to be about unravelling a different kind of mystery: the puzzle of why, despite seeming to be the most ordinary hue, this mysterious green had somehow captured the imagination of the most powerful and wealthy people in the Tang dynasty. And this search expanded into exploring other people’s desire for green through the centuries, into learning more about celadon— the generic name given to all such Chinese gray-green porcelain
²
— and into finding other greens whose secrets had been lost.

Famen temple is a two-hour drive from Xi’an—the capital of China for more than a thousand years. In the eighth and ninth centuries, when it was at its peak, two million people lived in and around Chang’ An (as—optimistically and in the end inaccurately—it was then called, meaning “Place of Everlasting Peace”), enjoying the prosperity of the Tang dynasty period. Every day from the walled city gates they could see the camel caravans setting out toward the west with silks, spices, ceramics, alcohol and other heady products of the Middle Kingdom. Famen was three or four days along the road, a resting point for the camels and horses, and a praying point for those merchants who believed the blessings of the Buddha could help their expedition.

Once, this place was one of the most important Buddhist centers in China. Ever since the site was first built on at least eighteen hundred years ago, its location had proved ideal for catching big donations from superstitious traders as they set out on their long journey. And by the time of the Tang dynasty it had become a huge complex, with dozens of temples and hundreds of monks. But most importantly, it was said to contain one of the greatest treasures of Buddhism: a finger bone of the Buddha himself.

There was tremendous cachet in having a bit of the Buddha, not least because, according to records, his body was actually cremated. Quite how the abbots of Famen staked their claim to holding one of the few pieces of the Enlightened One that could have miraculously rolled out of the ashes is no longer clear, but by the seventh century the story was widely accepted. In total, eight Tang emperors went to see the relic: the seventh was the Emperor Yizong, who visited Famen in 873 and borrowed the finger to take it on a celebrity tour of the empire for a full year. It didn’t save him from the Grim Reaper, though, and when his twelve-year-old son Xizong returned it in 874 his advisers and the senior monks of Famen were beginning to realize that its blessing might not save the regime either. So in an attempt to appease fate the young emperor donated one of the greatest treasure hauls ever given to a Chinese temple— which included some of that secret celadon.

I reached Famen in the mid-afternoon. Even its location sounded poetic: “south of the Qi mountains and north of the Wei river, in a mysterious land.” And indeed, as we drove across the bridge over the Wei, we found ourselves in an area of curious caves cut into sandstone, with mountains behind. It seemed as if we had somehow crossed over a line and passed the first imaginary sentry post on the long journey to the west. “So fertile is the land in Zhonguan, that even bitter plants turn sweet once grown here,” a Tang dynasty poet had written. Perhaps he was speaking metaphorically, about either holiness or corruption, but in any case everywhere we looked there were sweet corns drying on three-meter-high racks, creating splotches of yellow all over the landscape.

What did I know about celadon? I knew that when I had first arrived in Hong Kong and seen it—in museums and antiques shops and people’s homes—I hadn’t really understood it at all. It had seemed to be about the colors I hadn’t been attracted to: the non-colors, which can best be described conceptually or meteorologically, with words like misty, dreamy, ghostly, pale, foggy. But then I began to love them, to love their delicacy and to enjoy tracing the patterns—of dragons or phoenixes or lotuses—that some of the porcelain-makers incised into their underglaze, so you can just see them if you swivel them against a light. Some of the best celadons are deeply flawed. They have a deep spider’s-web pattern, or “crackle,” which to some Western tastes is rather strange—I hated it when I first saw it. But to Chinese people it looks tantalizingly like the fissures in jade, and they prize these dark lines on the pale green.

The best explanation I have heard about how crackle could be beautiful came from Rosemary Scott, the academic consultant to the Asian Art department at Christie’s. She explained how the effect was carefully managed so that, paradoxically, the bowl became perfect by being slightly imperfect. “You can’t get it too wrong; but you have to get it just wrong enough,” she said. The technical explanation is that the body and glaze of the porcelain contract and expand at different rates in the kiln, creating a pressure on the outer surface. The poetic explanation is that it represents a state of exquisite elemental tension, with the earthen body being forced through the water-like glaze by the element of fire. There is a sense of life in these cracked pots, too, Ms. Scott said. “I was talking to a modern ceramicist who makes crackle glazes, and she said they keep cracking for some time after firing. You could be sitting quietly in the sitting room and suddenly there’s a little ‘ping.’”

I also knew that the word “celadon” did not originally relate to porcelain at all. There are two versions of where the word came from and neither involves China. One is that it was named after Saladin, the nemesis of the Christian crusaders, who apparently once sent a big gift of forty pieces of onion-green-ware to Sultan Nureddin in 1117. But it seems odd that anyone should have named these pretty and frail export items after a tough Muslim fighter (unless of course it was mockery), and the more interesting theory is that celadon was named after the slightly dorky romantic hero of Honoré d’Urfé’s best-selling novel
Astrée
.