Orchard hill coffee saucer

Bone china

Bone china is a type of porcelain body first developed in the UK in which calcined ox bone, bone ash, is a major ingredient. It is characterized by extremely high whiteness, translucency and strength. orchard hill coffee saucer may be an example of this process.

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

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

The manufacture of bone china commonly makes use of a 2 stage firing where the first "biscuit" is fired without a glaze at 1280