The first page of d’Entrecolles’s first porcelain-related letter. He goes on to explain that despite the hardships involved, many of the city’s Christian converts work in the porcelain trade, and that he has checked what they’ve told him against some textbooks and “acquired a fairly exact knowledge of all aspects of this fine art.” D’Entrecolles periodically loses the plot-he gets distracted giving statistics about the city, explaining its policing strategies, and relating a local legend about a woman who gives birth to a serpent. “My Reverend Father,” it begins, “The visits that I have made from time to time at Jingdezhen… have given me in turn an opportunity to instruct myself concerning the manner in which one makes this beautiful porcelain which is so admired and which is exported to all parts of the world… I believe that a detailed description of all that is concerned with this sort of work should be of some use in Europe.” This first letter, sent to the treasurer of the Jesuit missions to China in September of 1712, makes the author’s intentions clear immediately. Although the would-be spy made it to Jingdezhen around 1700, over a decade had passed before he was able to mail a description of his findings to France. When he was allowed to visit the factories, d’Entrecolles, despite his fluency in Chinese, struggled with the workers’ job-specific lingo. Many trade secrets were kept within families, passed down to the next generation only when the previous one retired. D’Entrecolles had to deal with scrutiny on a number of levels. “D’Entrecolles’s superiors plainly sent him to Jingdezhen on a mission of industrial espionage.” An 18th-century porcelain plate from Jingdezhen. The ruling class was growing impatient-increasingly, “there was intense interest at the French court… in discovering how porcelain was made,” Finlay writes. ( One account diagnosed it as an eggshell-and-fish-scale mixture that was shaped into plates and vases, and then left underground for a century to cure.) Attempts to reverse-engineer the process had likewise been unsuccessful.
Although Europeans guessed at how the people of Jingdezhen made this “white gold,” they were pretty far off. Virtually all of this valuable material came from the Chinese city of Jingdezhen, where it had first been invented, and which roared all day and night with fires from the kilns. At the time, much of Europe was seized with a mania for imported porcelain- in the words of the English journalist and author Daniel Defoe, everyone who could afford to was “piling china up on the tops of cabinets, escritoires and every chimney-piece, to the tops of the ceilings… till it became a grievance.” When he set out from France, he did so with a particular assignment.
Carl Linnaeus developed his system of classification with the help of Chinese plant samples that were sent to him by a Jesuit missionary.Īlthough many of these were lucky discoveries, d’Entrecolles’s experience was slightly different. Priests came back from their missions with everything from technological plans to bags of malaria-curing cinchona bark. Wilhelm Lamprecht/Public DomainĪs Finlay explains, Jesuits at the time saw their missionary work as a kind of back-and-forth-as they spread the teachings of Christianity and Western science to other countries, they gathered valuable local knowledge in return. The 17th-century Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette, pictured preaching to and learning from Native Americans on the Mississippi river. As the historian Robert Finlay writes in The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World Histor y, d’Entrecolles was a skilled translator with “a passion for the curious and unusual, along with a gift for sifting and marshaling information.” Known for his friendliness and wisdom, he was sent to China in 1698, along with nine other missionaries. When Francois Xavier d’Entrecolles joined the priesthood in 1682, he probably didn’t plan to become the world’s first industrial spy. Back in the 17th century, all it took to steal trade secrets was a Jesuit missionary with an eye for detail who was fluent in Chinese and willing to spend a lot of time in a ceramics factory.
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And China is trying to partner with the European Union on a suite of new moon bases partly because they can’t work on scientific projects with the United States, thanks to laws meant to prevent secret-stealing.īut intellectual property theft hasn’t always involved elaborate software programs and moonshots. Just this month, the same company was accused of using hidden tracking software to keep tabs on their chief ride-hailing rival, Lyft. An executive from Uber has been accused of stealing autonomous car-related data from his old employer, Google. Plenty of today’s technological arms races involve an element of industrial espionage. A brush-painted porcelain pot, made in Jingdezhen in the mid-1700s.
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