Can you describe the Noritake fine china line?

When we manufacture... and we make a number of different kinds of finer china... the name fine china really is synonymous. In Europe they call it porcelain and in United States we call it china. The term china really comes from the fact that the origin of the product was in China, that's where they made the beautiful porcelains, which were imported into the west in the 19th century and were really considered to be really valuable, valuable objects. Of course prior to that time, people had used plates fashioned out of metal or fashioned out of animal bone or fashioned out of earthen ware, they were very delicate. So, people wanted to have something that was banded in gold or platinum and had beautiful decorations on it but the glaze was really smooth and particularly in the 20th century as the tide in America was rising. One of the great things that people wanted in their home was to have a set of china. It was really considered to be a tremendously important status symbol, a family heirloom, that was able to be passed along from generation to generation because in those days, people sat down and they really wanted wonderful dinners together, and people had their Sunday dinners or their holiday meals or whatever and they absolutely had it on the fine china. So fine china generally is gold banded. It has a really beautiful glaze. It can be made out of bone china, which uses a cattle bone ash, it is a very old technique, actually the technique was developed by Wedgewood back in the 18th century and it's all porcelain. So it is a vitrified product. It is a solid glaze. In today's world, we don't use any lead or other toxic metals to manufacture as they did back in the 20s and 30s... all manufacturers had used a little bit of that to fill out glaze a little bit easier, but the glaze has to be really beautiful, smooth, generally speaking a gold band.