Buckingham soup cereal bowl

Bone china

Bone china is a type of porcelain body originally developed in the UK in which calcined ox bone, bone ash, is a major part. It is characterised by brilliant whiteness, translucency and strength. buckingham soup/cereal bowl may be an example of this process.

The initial use of bone ash in ceramics is attributed to Thomas Frye in seventeen-forty-eight in which he used it to develop a kind of soft-paste porcelain. In Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Josiah Spode continued with further developments, and duly popularized it, by combining it with China stone, china clay and kaolin to compete against the imported Oriental porcelain.

The initial elemental recipe of four parts china stone, six parts bone ash, and three and a half parts china clay is still the standard English body.

The production of bone china ordinarily involves a 2 stage firing process where the first "biscuit" is fired without a glaze at 1280