Meissen — the first European hard-paste porcelain factory, established in 1710 near Dresden — appears in poems about the discovery of a European secret and the prestige economy of the eighteenth century; A poem about the alchemist Böttger's discovery of the porcelain formula might describe it as "not gold, but something harder and more beautiful — the white gold that would make Dresden richer than any mine"; Meissen's figures — the commedia dell'arte characters, the allegorical seasons, the birds from Buffon's natural history — appear in poems about the eighteenth-century imagination: a world rendered in porcelain, miniaturised and made permanent; In a poem about Augustus the Strong's obsession with Japanese porcelain, Meissen is the German answer: "he could not stop buying from Japan, so he made his own Japan, in Saxony, in white"; A poem about European cultural competition might trace the spread of porcelain factories — Meissen, then Vienna, then Sèvres, then Chelsea, then Derby — each one a national argument made in clay; Rilke's "The Panther" and his other poems about captive energy find an analogue in Meissen's modelled animals: the porcelain tiger in Augustus's Japanese Palace, perfect, still, perpetually caught.