Celadon and Chains

The civilisation that made the most coveted ceramic of the medieval world, the celadon its Chinese rivals ranked first under heaven, fired it in a kingdom that owned a third of its people. For close to a thousand years it ranked people by birth and bound the lowest to the foulest work, and the art and learning the world still admires could not have stood a day without them.

Celadon and Chains tells Korea's story with the unfree at its centre: the potters whose celadon a museum keeps though their names are lost; the slaves who raised the palaces of a new capital; the servants who freed the scholar for his books. Here is the child sold in a famine year for grain to keep her family alive, and the tens of thousands of state slaves whose registers were burned in a palace courtyard in 1801, freed in an afternoon by the dynasty their labour had built.

.It traces, too, the longer shadow: a hierarchy the dynasty called as natural as heaven over earth, and a bondage so completely dissolved that its descendants now claim the blood of the masters. Korean slavery differed, crucially, from that of Greece, Rome, and the Atlantic: its people shared the language, faith, and face of their owners, marked by nothing but birth, enslaved by their own kind and not a foreign one. This is what it means to inherit the celadon, the printing, and the alphabet from a civilisation that built them on the people it owned and then forgot.

Clear-eyed popular history that never looks away. The fourth book in the Price of Civilization series.