Short answers, pulled from the story.
The oldest known pottery vessels come from East Asia. Pottery fragments found at Xianrendong Cave in Jiangxi province, China, date back 20,000 years. These vessels were made by mobile foragers during the Late Glacial Maximum, well before the invention of agriculture.
Bone china is a type of soft-paste porcelain developed by English potter Josiah Spode. It contains a minimum of 30 percent phosphate derived from animal bone, calculated as calcium phosphate. From its development until the later part of the twentieth century, production was concentrated almost exclusively in Stoke-on-Trent, England.
A recipe for hard-paste porcelain was devised at the Meissen factory in Dresden shortly after 1710 and was on sale by 1713. In 1712, the French Jesuit father Francois Xavier d'Entrecolles published many of the Chinese porcelain manufacturing secrets, helping spread knowledge of the process across Europe.
The first true porcelain in Japan was produced by a Korean potter named Yi Sam-pyeong, who was among the potters abducted during Toyotomi Hideyoshi's attempts to conquer China in the 1590s, campaigns known as the Ceramic Wars. Yi Sam-pyeong discovered the raw material for porcelain at Arita. The Kakiemon ware tradition that developed there was declared an important intangible cultural treasure by the Japanese government in 1971.
The oldest ceramics in the Americas, dating from 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, have been found along the Pacific coast of Ecuador at Valdivia and Puerto Hormiga, and in the San Jacinto Valley of Colombia. In the United States, the oldest pottery dates to 2500 BCE, found in the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve in Jacksonville, Florida.
The four main types are earthenware, stoneware, porcelain, and bone china. Earthenware is fired at lower temperatures and remains permeable to water. Stoneware is fired at high temperatures and becomes nonporous. Porcelain is fired at between 1200 and 1400 degrees Celsius, producing a vitrified, translucent body. Bone china combines feldspathic material, kaolin, and at least 30 percent bone ash, giving it exceptional whiteness and strength.