Meissen Meissen Meissen (in German orthography: "Meißen", ) is a town of approximately 30,000 about northwest of Dresden on both banks of the Elbe river in the Free State of Saxony, in eastern Germany. Meissen is the home of Meissen porcelain, the Albrechtsburg castle, the Gothic Meissen Cathedral and the Meissen Frauenkirche. The "Große Kreisstadt" is the capital of the Meissen district. Meissen is sometimes known as the "cradle of Saxony". The city grew out of the early Slavic settlement of "Misni" inhabited by the Glomacze tribe and was founded as a German town by King Henry the Fowler in 929.
Meissen porcelain equivalents in other countries. It was a very expensive product by the time it reached European customers, and represented wealth, importance and refined taste in Europe. Local attempts to produce porcelain, such as the brief experiment that produced Medici porcelain had met with failure. At the beginning of the eighteenth century Johann Friedrich Böttger pretended he had solved the dream of the alchemists, to produce gold from worthless materials. When King Augustus II of Poland heard of it, he kept him in protective custody and requested him to produce gold. For years Johann Friedrich Böttger was unsuccessful in this effort.