Yaoli potters ran out of clay

A visit to Yaoli


Yaoli (translated as Inside the Ceramic Kiln) is a small village approximately 60 km outside of Jingdezhen and a short distance away from Mt. Kaolin (GaolingShan), the source of petuntze, the white feldspar that makes porcelain what it is. It is a walk back in time to what it might have been like during Ming and Qing Dynasties in a porcelain production town in the Jiangxi countryside, but no one is working in clay there anymore. Apparently the local clay ran out long ago. The well-preserved ancient ancestral halls of the Cheng family showing feudal life, classical courtyard buildings, and intriguing winding alleys tell of a different time. The village of Yaoli is set in a beautiful landscape of old-growth forests, hills and the Yaohe river valley. It is also famous for its green tea.

Yaoli is also the historic meeting place for the mobilization of the resistance war against Japan and rear office of the New Fourth Army and former residence of General Chenyi. Signs of the building of a tourist attraction for ceramics and tea consist of a few hotels, even a resort and new construction. Unlike the rebuilt tourist site towns I visited with Richard in Yunnan--LiJiang and Dali- ancient walled cities that have been turned into bustling vacation destinations for mostly Chinese tourists, busy like a theme park, it is not yet heavily promoted as a destination. A bigger road is being built from Jingdezhen, a process we watched for an hour or so while our bus waited for the gravel to be laid out over a 20 meter stretch while we watched the building of a wall at the side of the road. This was frustrating to the others on the bus, but I love to watch work.

We arrived in Yaoli by lunchtime. The vegetable available at lunch and dinner in Yaoli includes the green stems of local ferns that we will find in the woods the next morning. They don't seem to use the fiddleheads we stalk wild here in spring. In the restaurant and the home in which we spent the night, pictures of Mao, still, dominate dining room walls. Another topic, another time.

The ceramic tile roof lines of old Yaoli town layer over brick houses, courtyard and alleys.A clean fast moving river runs through the town separates the ancient town from the newer area. Bridges connect at regular intervals. Small dams break the flow.

The villagers use the river in a controlled sequence for washing vegetables, washing clothes, and sewage so as not to affect those immediately downstream. What about furthur downstream and into the future, I wonder? After lunch and an exploratory walk around the town, we started up a dusty road toward the site of the ancient pottery, as yet unconvinced of the value of the tickets sold in town to visit the kiln and pottery sites, a feudal house, a museum and the hiking trails up through virgin pine to the spectacular Nanshan Waterfall and down through bamboo forests and tea plantations. We would find these tickets, while costly, well worth the price for our two days in Yaoli and environs.
















On to the Excavation Site of the Ancient Kilns at Raozhou

There is evidence of porcelain production here from the Song (ca. 960) to the Ming Dynasty (ca 1600). I found on line a carved celadon vase from the Raozhou kilns. Shards at the site indicate that blue and white porcelains were produced here as well.The excavated foundation of these two long dragon kilns climb up a hill creating an internal draft.













The excavated remains of clay preparation pits in the ground around which the river bends are marked with explanatory signs in Chinese and English.
















Reconstructions of the pottery plant here include a potter's wheel:

An example of how wood was stacked like a roof to keep the wood dry:














A water powered hammer mill and a horizontal wheel for grinding raw material:














We can only imagine what function this piece of equipment has...
















Not everyone shares this potter's interest in kilns and clay. Dean Huang, Huang Jinlei 黄金雷, my travel buddy, is an English teacher at the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute. He, as a non ceramist, knows little about things clay, but is thankfully, one who has a wide-eyed interest in all things and a particular delight in refreshing mountain air hike, intrepid wanderings and cheap local travels.
Here is Dean enjoying the roar along the hike to the waterfall I will begin to write about tomorrow.

Flow of Wisdom

The porcelain of Jingdezhen goes back long and deeply into Chinese history. Jingdezhen porcelain, developed in the Song and Tang, was a treasure of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The processes that make this clay workable are codified from the days of the Imperial kilns. In my first days of working in the studio at Jingdezhen, it was this fine white clay itself that invited me. I began exploring the clay in my hands, making, as I often do to start, stones and bones. The clay was soft. The weather was rainy. The clay, as it slowly dried, became chalky and fragile. This clay, made mostly of feldspar, is difficult to work. The stones and bones gathered to dry. Students gathered to wonder why I was making these stones, sticks, spirals, bones. 我还不知道。I don't know yet, I answered.




When I arrived here I thought I would do some work with bamboo, inspired by the lashed bamboo scaffolding seen in construction sites all over Asia and intriguing to me since my 1975 visit to China. Bamboo is an amazing plant, a grass really, that spreads its shoots shallow and far.
The bundle of bamboo trimmings I got from a gardener on campus the first day was of little use but to attract attention from students curious about the foreigner as I worked outside the studio sorting and trimming. Again, the answer to the question of what I was doing was "我还不知道? I still don't know". This not knowing was alien to the way of thinking here.


This batch of bamboo never found its way into the work. At some point I would know, or I would not. Some pieces come together after much consideration and planning; others find their way to being through the working. This was the kind of work that was to develop through the work, without clear ends.

Still unsure as to how to proceed, I, at last, appropriated a 3 meter split bamboo with a soft arching curve, with its strengthening divisions exposed and began to consider an installation using these made and found materials. I washed the bamboo and considered how to use it.

The stones and bones were finished to the "ring like a bell" density of the 1300C fire as my time in Jingdezhen was ending. And gently ring they did. I lashed the the ends, hung the bamboo from a tree branch outside the studio with help from James Gao and WuFei. I printed inspirational quotes in English on slips of paper that were tied to the lashing. These were copies of the ones I gave to students after an English Walk and Talk earlier in the week. Rich in cultural reference, I had explained the meanings to them. Quotations from Picasso, Martin Luther King and other Westerners were added to Chinese voices, from Buddha, Lao tze, Confucius, Dalai Lama, and Mao.

I sorted the stones were sorted by color of clay, from Tianbao clay browns to porcelain whites with painted cobalt blues and stripes of white clay through cobalt base between. I lashed each unglazed stick with ends glazed as jewels and hung it from the end of the bamboo. Together they rang lightly in the wind. A horseshoe shaped porcelain stirrup supported the other end. Stones flow like geologically from dark to light. A listening head looks up for more, absorbing knowledge dripping from above.

It didn't last long. I heard from friends that children pocketed the stones and by the end of May Day Festival it was gone. So it goes. Friends enjoyed the language of my art and process and will remember, as I remember the making.