Limited Edition Buddha

The early 18th century saw Europe's aristocratic and artistic communities directing their gaze towards China, then a synonym for cultured living and luxury. Courtly grounds soon became home to pagodas and tea-houses. Items designed in the Chinese manner that came to be known as chinoiseries proceeded to adorn palaces and mansions - including those of the Manufactory's founder, Augustus the Strong.

The art-loving Prince-Elector was determined from the very outset to emulate the Asians. In 1708, a year before European porcelain began to be serially produced, he entrusted his court alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger with eight Chinese figures in the white as model to be copied. They included one of the "Budai Ho-Shang", god of contentment, which, in around 1713, Böttger also cast in white porcelain. In 2008, the Manufactory marked the tercentenary of Böttger's jotting down a viable formula for porcelain on 15 January 1708 by re-casting the figure from the moulds he had made to a formula that included the "Colditz clay" originally used. And now his laughing Buddha is again being premiered in a limited edition, with discreet gilded decoration custom-developed for the purpose being applied to the noble white porcelain on this occasion.

When Böttger designed his Buddha, however, he departed from the prototype, merely retaining the general manner of the Chinese original. This figurine was originally conceived as a pagod censer, which served as a dome for incense cones in those days, having openings at its mouth and ears through which the fragrant fumes could escape. Böttger appears to have geared himself more to standard western ideals of beauty where the actual figure was concerned, too: he substitutes the original pagod's obesity and the boundless bliss that accompanies it with a rather tauter physical appearance of the kind that was much more in keeping with late-Baroque