Buckingham tea cup

Bone china

Bone china is a kind of porcelain body initially used in England in which calcined ox bone, bone ash, is an essential constituent. It is characterised by high whiteness, translucency and strength. buckingham tea cup may be an example of this process.

The initial use of bone ash in ceramics is assigned to Thomas Frye in in the late 1740s in which he used it to develop a type of soft-paste porcelain. In As the 18th century drew to a close, Josiah Spode carried on with further developments, and duly made it popular, by combining it with kaolin, China stone and china clay to compete with the imported Oriental porcelain.

The initial elementary formula of four parts china stone, three and a half parts china clay, and six parts bone ash remains the standard English body.

Bone china production commonly involves a two stage firing process where the first "biscuit" is fired without a glaze at 1280