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It could have ended badly for the apothecaries assistant Böttger; with his shenanigans he was able to trick dukes and courtiers but the expected gold he was not able to make. To prevent Böttger’s flight Augustus the Strong incarcerated him in his fortress Königstein several times. In this difficult situation help came from Walther von Tschirnhaus – he diverted the desire of the notoriously cash-strapped king from gold to porcelain. The polymath at the court of Augustus had already spent years with experiments on how to produce the „white gold“ from China in Saxony. In order to achieve the high firing temperatures needed he used concave mirrors and consulted miners from the Freiberg school of mines. Today Böttger is known as the inventor of European porcelain but Walther von Tschirnhaus also had his – large – share in the development of the recipe for porcelain.