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 was successfully produced at Meissen in 1708 by Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, though Johann Friedrich Böttger who continued his work has often been credited with the discovery of this recipe. As the recipe was kept secret, experiments continued elsewhere, mixing glass materials (fused and ground into a frit) with clay or other substances to give whiteness and a degree of plasticity. Plymouth porcelain, founded in 1748, which moved to Bristol soon after, was the first English factory to make hard-paste. Soft-paste porcelain Soft-paste porcelain (sometimes simply "soft paste", or "artificial porcelain") is a type of ceramic material in pottery, usually