Sri Lanka ceramics eye another Oscar for acting bone china

Sri Lanka's ceramics industry, which has supplied crockery for Hollywood's glitterati at their annual Oscar banquet, is now hoping to win its own acting award - for look-a-like bone china.

A factory in this village 60 kilometres away from Colombo has begun turning out a product that contains calcium phosphate, the raw material that goes into the making of genuine bone china, but unlike the Real McCoy contains no bone ash at all.

"This is just as good, but the price is about 30 percent less," said the chairman of Dankotuwa Porcelain, Sunil G. Wijesingha, holding up the ivory-coloured product against a light beam to display its translucency.

Traditional bone china, prized for its delicacy and originally meant for emperors, contains 30 to 37 percent bone ash, which is made from cows' bones.

The company shipped its first container load of "new bone china" to Montanaro, a wholesaler in Italy, last month and since then the highly labour intensive factory has not been able to cope with orders.

"We are no longer in the utility business," said Wijesingha. "What we are selling is a lifestyle product. We have constantly to keep changing not only the patterns but the shapes as well."

The factory, which employs just over 1,000 workers, has long been a supplier of delicate dinner sets for western markets and proudly displays some of the cups and saucers, complete with the "RL" logo, that it makes for Ralph Lauren.

Protected inside a glass cabinet are examples of the dinner sets it has made for US store chain Macy's for 13 straight years.

For Hollywood's Oscar banquets, an elaborate gold-bordered design known as "Magnificence" was used in the late 1990s and again, but this time in platinum, in 2001. Ornate gold-plated crockery has also found a lucrative market in Gulf states, according to Dankotuwa officials.

(AFP)