Finding my Shanghai Clay Home

 乐天陶折Pottery Workshop in Shanghai feels like home.

Tuesday March 27

After the last trip to town, by Didi on Saturday, taking 2 hours in traffic, I am determined to find my way by Metro. Into my sack I pack toothbrush and change of clothes, clay tools and about 10 pounds of the porcelain I ordered in week two. I have found this clay to be unworkable for much of anything. I will try it for throwing today. So with a load on my back, I get a yellow bike and begin a ride to the nearest Metro stop, Jianchuan Lu, line 5. It is hot, load is heavy, it is further than I expect, but at last, I am on my way to the city. The workshop is open until 9 on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I arrive about 3pm and set to work. I make some porcelain bowls and cups, then switch to the big pot brown clay and throw 2 BreadPots and lids and some mugs and bowls. I work until about 7:30. I leave the pots uncovered with a plan to come back tomorrow. I am happy to have a clay home in Shanghai and a clay sister here in Guo. Here is their website.

Upstairs display area

180 Shaanxi Nan Lu

It is not too far by Metro to the Rock and Wood International Youth Hostel near Zhongshan Park. I walk from the Metro to the Hostel, about 20 minutes.I have a small room with a bathroom and only a window to the corridor. There are towels, but I have forgotten to bring soap. I call Richard and then go to bed. I am lonely and tired.

Wednesday March 28
In the morning I have a western style breakfast at the hostel and then hop on a yellow bike to Zhongshan Park. The park is full abuzz, dancing, flute, parents with kids, old folks and men watching men at game tables. I walk and watch. I shoot videos of what they translate as "Square Dancing", dancing in the squares, which is very popular. The videos capture the overlapping sounds of the different dance groups practicing. Morning walk in ZhongShan Park 中山园 here.

I arrive at the Pottery Workshop at noon and set to working on the pieces I started yesterday.  The porcelain bowls have mostly cracked overnight. (Guo agrees that the high white porcelain is only good for slip.) Most of the other pieces are ready for me to trim. Patience is a big part of the clay process, but my time is short and a few pieces are lost in the rush.

Friday March 30
Back at the pottery I attend to my  work. At 5 I leave to go to change into clean clothes at nearby rental I found on bookings. I find the address down a small alley. The white bearded man who lives in the building hasn't a clue what I am talking about. A woman comes, she calls a guy. He comes on his motorbike 10 minutes later and opens a coded key box. No key! He calls a woman, who tells me that alas, the place is not available but she had updated it on the site. I am in clay covered clothes on my way to a seder with no where to stay for the night. I book a bed in a hostel (another story for later).
I get on a yellow OFO bike and ride to the old temple Ohel Rachel Synagogue, built by and named by Sasson for his wife. I change clothes in the bathroom and wander about taking pics until the seder begins. It is about 200 Shanghai Jews. Ohel Rachel Shanghai Seder

Nanshan Waterfall at Yaoli

Click on post title or slideshow to the right to see bigger pics.

We paid the entrance fee, which was good for two days and included entrance to various sites in Yaoli as well as to the trail up to the falls. The trail is a one way loop and we are the only ones hiking. As I wrote in my post about Yaoli, this is a place whose tourism is being planned, but has not yet been invaded by crowds. As Dean Huang and I started up to the falls I was reminded of the pine and granite landscapes of New Hampshire and the gorges and waterfalls of my old haunt, Ithaca, N.Y.

But none of these favorite places features the vast waves of rustling feathery yellow green bamboo that we saw across the way and walked through as we descended. My Chinese friends are surprised when I tell them that we do not have this kind of bamboo forest where I live.

NanShan waterfall, I am told by a friend, but my research does not prove, is partially man made. From the base of this wonderful flow we cannot tell what is above. Is it a dam? No evidence from below. I have also been told that, due to some military secrets, the area has been at times forbidden to outsiders.

Waterfalls are my holy land and this one was a pilgrimage worthy of the hike, perfectly orchestrated for serenity and awe. Power of fast flowing water led us up to the unexpected force and magnitude of the large fall, followed by the peaceful hike down through the forest of bamboo.
We followed the sound of water rushing to find ourselves looking up a powerful wall of water.


Then we started down through the bamboo.


The trail brought us down past a small shelter with bamboo roots used to echo the curving roof lines of ancient architecture and tea harvesters finishing their day's work. The young leaves are harvested in the early and late day. When we ask around for a place to stay we find that the farmer's homes are housing the migrant workers now and so not available for us to rent rooms for the night. Across the river, we found a farmers house, shop with 3 rooms. We were offered the special room, with a television and a double bed for 40 yuan. We declined and negotiated the two separate rooms for the same price. We had dinner of fern stems there with the family kids, while the dad roasted tea leaves in a wide pan. My room was white washed, white painted beds, white linen, very soothing...sleep. Next day we hike up behind the village, past the Taoist hermits. I found fiddle head ferns, but we had eaten the stems. They don't eat the heads. And they looked perfect. Then a found a raspberry, one single orange raspberry. Dean had never seen a raspberry, he did not know what it was. He trusted me and ate it. One berry. They must grow somewhere in China.

Back again from China

I returned last week from my second trip to China this year. I returned to Jingdezhen for the International Ceramics Festival and an Exhibition in which I was showing a piece which is now in the collection of the Jingdezhen Ceramics Museum.

My visit was enriched by my now old friends in Jingdezhen who put me up, provided a studio for me to work in and traveled with me to LuShan, one of the five sacred Taoist mountains. I will continue to write and show pictures as I adjust to the time zones of home and sort through photos. .

The ease with which I can travel in China, with my Chinese improving every day, is stark contrast to the tightly controlled tour I was on in 1975. That year was the last time I was in Shanghai, a city whose changes are vast over these 34 years and changing still as they rapidly build new, exotic structures in advance of the Shanghai Expo in 2010.

More to come. Nice to be home.

LaoChang, the Old Factory area

Welcome to LaoChang, the Old Factory area.
It is a lively sunny day. The clay and plaster molds are all out in the sun. The pace of outdoor work is picked up with the sunshine after endless days of drizzle. Such is the universality of clay work. Things will dry quickly and time must not be lost or wasted. I find my way through endless alleys. A small girl finds a place to pee, a small boy discovers me looking at him.

There is nothing in my experience or definition of "factory" that resembles what I find here in this old factory area. In this area there are seemingly independent ceramic enterprises, large and small, every stage of ceramic process and life, interconnected by a main street and narrow winding ways, split by a railroad track. In the flat area below the tracks, there are potters, painters and glazers, throwing, painting and spraying.
Unfired pots are deftly moved through the streets on hand pulled wheeled carts. Beyond the tracks are masters with with rows of plaster molds being poured and released and turned in the sun.

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.