Meissen Another popular tourist sight is the world-famous Meissen porcelain factory. From spring to autumn, several festivals take place in Meissen, such as the pottery market or the "Weinfest", which celebrates the wine harvest. Meissen wine is produced at the vineyards in the river valley ("Elbtal") around the town, part of the Saxonian wine region, one of the northernmost in Europe. Meissen is twinned with: 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
French porcelain French porcelain French porcelain has a history spanning a period from the 17th century to the present. The French were heavily involved in the early European efforts to discover the secrets of making the hard-paste porcelain known from Chinese and Japanese export porcelain. They succeeded in developing soft-paste porcelain, but Meissen porcelain was the first to make true hard-paste, around 1710, and the French took over 50 years to catch up with Meissen and the other German factories. But by the 1760s, kaolin had been discovered near Limoges, and the relocated royal-owned Sèvres factory took the lead in European porcelain