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.
Soft-paste porcelain firing temperatures are lower compared with hard-paste porcelain, or, more likely, because the finished products actually are far softer than hard-paste, and early versions were much easier to scratch or break, as well as being prone to shatter when hot liquid was suddenly poured into them. The German Meissen porcelain had developed hard-paste porcelain by 1708, and later German factories usually managed to find the secret out from former Meissen employees, beginning with Vienna porcelain in 1718. The other European countries had much longer to wait, but most factories eventually switched from soft to hard-paste, having discovered both the secret