One Potter's Tour of China

by Jean Silverman

This article first appeared in Studio Potter Network Newsletter, Volume 10, Number 2 (Autumn 1997).
Copyright © 1997 by Studio Potter. All rights reserved.
This is part one of a two-part article.

Map

China.

It hardly seems possible that I will actually set foot in a land that for me has always had all the qualities of legend - improbably fantastic landscape, an ancient and enigmatic history, exotic wildlife, and a culture as subtle as it has been powerful.

Friday, June 27

It's about two o'clock when I board the bus for Boston's Logan Airport on the first leg of my journey. I imagine Marco Polo setting out from Venice with the same sense of vaulting into the unknown, and I'm grateful I won't have to ride a camel at any point.

Sunday, June 29

Two days later (somewhere over the Pacific we have crossed the International Date Line) the plane touches down in Shanghai. It is 6:30 a.m. local time. In varying states of stupor we decant into the airport, which looks like airports everywhere, though a trifle down-at-the-heels.

It's already hot and the air is moist, the sky hazy. Our tour bus, which is mercifully air-conditioned, as were all our busses on this trip, plunges into the traffic while our Shanghai guide, Mr. Gao, begins to tell us about his city.

Shanghai's most notable feature by far is the incessant and omnipresent construction and demolition. Whole neighborhoods are being reduced to rubble; hundreds of giant skyscrapers are replacing them. There is nothing beautiful or even quaint about these streets. The older buildings visible mostly seem to date from the '50s and '60s and belong to what I think of as the "Soviet Monolithic" school of architecture. Any replacement has to be an improvement.

Here and there beyond the scaffolding, Shanghai still has a few of the nineteenth century, European-style buildings that have distinguished it among Chinese cities. They seem refreshingly human, and I am dismayed by how many are being chewed up in the name of progress.

This "out with the old, in with the new at any cost" attitude seemed to characterize all the cities we visited on this tour. I felt a tremendous sense of energy, of gathering momentum and power everywhere, but at the same time an almost shocking (in China) disregard for the sort of everyday history of places that can only be read in their homely details, an old building being rehabilitated, a public square restored. As if history were reserved only for civic monuments and tourist attractions, while the people dash headlong into what they imagine is their future. And yet they are very proud of their long, illustrious history.

Monday, June 30

This afternoon, after fighting through what is, even for Shanghai, a monumental traffic jam, we get into the new Shanghai Museum, every bit as stunning as it's said to be. It is well worth traveling halfway around the world to see. It is not a particularly large building, compared to, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Louvre, but it is just about perfect, and all the displays are beautifully designed and extensively documented.

In the central atrium of the new Shanghai Museum the main staircase rises four stories in the graceful, formal patterns of traditional temple and palace architecture.

Its plan, a circle set within a square, is a symbol as old as China itself. The square represents Earth, the circle Heaven. Much later, at the very end of our trip in Beijing, we will visit the Temple of Heaven, a Ming/Qing structure, which uses the same symbolic plan, circular temples enclosed by a protecting square wall. The museum, like the old temples, inspires awe both in itself and in what it contains.

I intend to go straight to the ceramics gallery, but pass the entrance to the bronzes and am led into temptation. The bronzes are glorious. The well-lighted displays and striking forms are irresistible, and I begin taking pictures.

The ceramics collection spans the millennia of Chinese pottery, and each one of the several hundred objects on display repays close study. The pots are more difficult to photograph though, since I've come without my flash attachment. No matter.

A ceramic scupture Bixie of the Eastern Han dynasty, 206 B.C. to 220 A.D., wards off evil spirits in the Shanghai Museum.

I am well into my second roll of film and about halfway through the gallery when I encounter what looks like a small detachment of the Chinese army. In some mix of words and sign language they tell me the museum is closing. "But Mr. Gao said it was open till eight o'clock," I protest.

Mr. Gao was wrong. Today they close at five. Why? "Today is holiday for Chinese people. Everybody leave work early to go to Bund to see fireworks. We celebrate return of Hong Kong."

Oh yes. We have arrived in the city just in time for the British departure from Hong Kong after nearly a century of colonial rule. The Chinese are indulging in a frenzy of festivities. Every building is covered with bunches of balloons and long, red banners announcing the event, on every street corner vendors are selling Chinese and Hong Kong flags, colorful pennants wave among forests of flags around every open space, streets are decked with hundreds of lights, red lanterns hang everywhere, and in addition to Shanghai's normal population of 15 million, we are told that thousands have come in from the countryside to take part in the fun.

Despite the fact that private cars are still a luxury here, the streets are clogged, the main avenues truly impassible. The city is in the throes of a major coronary. Everyone appears to be in the best of humors and having a wonderful time.

Wednesday, July 2

Today we shake the city's dust from our feet and set forth in our little bus for the pottery city of Yixing. As we speed along a brand-new four-lane highway I gaze eagerly out the windows at the emerging country. Rice paddies! Luminous green fields alternate with plots of vines with huge leaves and bright yellow flowers under pearl-grey skies. Squash, melon, cucumber - probably some of each, to judge by the dishes we've been served. Other plots grow corn. Someone says they grow two crops a year here. We're definitely in the south.

Gardens alternate with fish ponds that are also home to flocks of ducks and geese. A few white goats, so small they look like the wild ones. I spot a doe with two tiny kids, all three as white as if they'd just been polished. Large, two-story houses with porches and balconies and tiled roofs look prosperous. Most of these are one-family homes, a far cry from the cramped and dingy urban apartment buildings.

Canals and streams are everywhere in this wet, low-lying landscape, many completely choked with algae or water hyacinth. But over them arch bridges like those on the painted Canton china, and tied up along the banks are the narrow, flat-bottomed fishing boats pictured in countless paintings.

We roll through Wuxi, grey and industrial though billed as a "tourist" city, and catch glimpses of Lake Tai swathed in mist. In the distance I see my first Chinese mountains. They are the source of the clays that feed the ceramics industry of Yixing.

Along the road are businesses selling brick and stone, colorful roof tiles, immense pottery jars, plumbing fixtures - all sorts of construction material in fact, and garden supply centers too. I am entranced with the collections of twisted and weathered ornamental rocks without which no self-respecting Chinese garden can exist. I wonder how I could possibly take one home to New Hampshire.

This roadside forest of stones, many of which come from nearby Lake Tai, will be sold for garden landscaping.

Yixing, City of Clay

Just outside Yixing the roadsides are landscaped, like a parkway, with streetlights on tall pillars down the median strip. Surely they aren't... but they are ceramic; made in sections and as tall as telephone poles, each carries two openwork brackets to hold the lights. Great dragons in contrasting bas-relief swirl around the pillars among clumps of lichen-shaped clouds.

The city looks industrial. Although it's a hot day and the sun is shining, the air is heavy and the sky steel grey. The buildings we drive pass look grey too, but I can't tell if that's their natural color or the result of air pollution. Here too is major urban renewal, with much of the visible architecture reduced to rubble in preparation for substantial rebuilding. Perhaps all this demolition is contributing to the grit in the air.

Our bus rolls down a broad new boulevard, and just after crossing a river turns left into a gate set in a concrete wall. Suddenly we are in a courtyard; there's a pond with small trees and shrubbery, even a rose bush, and a small circular pavilion with yellow roof tiles.

We cross a stone bridge with guardian lions and pull up under the portico of our next hotel. From its name, The Yixing Hotel, I gather that it is the only hotel here, or at least the only one considered suitable for Westerners. Set back from the main road and protected by its outer wall and garden, it seems a haven from traffic and dust.

Inside, it is clean but distinctly shabby, and there is no elevator. On the other hand there are only three floors. We locate our rooms and collect our suitcases. The rest of the afternoon is free.

Some of the group go out walking, but I head straight for the little pavilion by the pond. To my amazed delight, the entire structure is made of clay - roof, columns, railing and floor, as well as the table and two stools that furnish it. Four brown clay columns entwined with bright yellow dragons swimming among turquoise blue clouds support the yellow-tiled roof that curls up at each corner in proper Chinese style. The low railing is formed of green-glazed tile in bamboo shapes.

I sit on one of the stools in the dappled shadow of an overhanging tree and feel as if I had walked into a painting, "Woman in Summer Pavilion Beside Pond." At last I know I am in China.

My "painting" is showing its age. However, where pieces of dragon have broken off, it is possible to study the construction. The inner core of heavily grogged clay forms a rough substructure over which finer-textured clay has been applied and modeled into a dragon shape. Both clays are a dark reddish brown; the colors are in the glaze.

Whoosh! Without any warning the center of the pond erupts into a fountain. The rising breeze blows spray towards my seat, and sunlight shining through it creates rainbows in the mist. As the sun slowly retreats into evening, several of the returning walkers join me to admire the rainbows.

Thursday, July 3

This morning, at last, we're off to see the teapots! All the pottery factories, it appears, are located in the village of Dingshu, which is about a half hour's drive out from Yixing. Now these streets look nothing like Europeanized Shanghai.

On our way to the No. 1 Purple Sand Teapot Factory we catch tantalizing glimpses of narrow, tree-lined streets, pots of all sizes in front of tiny shops, and distantly, a flash of water, boats and barges - and many more pots.

"Can't we get out of the bus? Can't we walk around here?" The cry goes up from the bus.

"Later," Peter, our guide, tells us. "After lunch. We visit the factory now."

At last we stop inside the factory courtyard. Men are pulling enormous wheelbarrows piled high with pugs of clay wrapped in yellow plastic. (How did potters manage before plastic? I wonder, not for the first time.)

We follow Peter inside. The term "factory" is misleading here. There's not a single machine in sight nor any workers standing in production lines. The large rectangular room has white-painted walls, a high ceiling, and floor-to-ceiling windows down each long side of the rectangle, which are all open to catch the slightest breeze. As usual, the day is wiltingly hot, but this workroom is relatively comfortable even without air-conditioning.

There are maybe 20 potters working here. Each has her own work table, tools, shelves and giant pottery crock to serve as a damp cupboard. I only see young women in this room; they are obviously skilled but are not the master potters in this factory. They work in their own studios, safe from invasion by teapot-crazed Americans.

Each potter has her own work area in the No. 1 Purple Sand Teapot Factory. The large storage jars hold moist clay and unfinished teapots.

Even in this one room there is so much going on it is hard to know where to start. The women do their best to continue working despite our presence, but find it difficult to concentrate. There's a lot of giggling when all the cameras come out. I decide to focus on one person who is constructing teapot bodies.

Constructing a Teapot

First she takes a chunk of clay and with a wooden mallet rapidly flattens it into an even, thin slab. Using a pair of dividers already set to a width of about four inches, she quickly and economically cuts a couple of rectangles four by eleven or so inches and adds them to a pile of similar pieces. She gathers all the clay scraps, works them together and, again with her mallet, pounds out another slab, which is cut into narrow rectangles.

She then takes a clay disk from a small pile already cut, places it on a turntable, wraps one of the larger rectangles around it, cuts the overlapping ends, lightly moistens their edges and joins them to form a cylinder. Taking a flat, broad wood tool, she turns the cylinder, paddling the upper edge to round off the profile while supporting the wall inside with her other hand. Then she takes a smaller clay disk, lays it over the center opening and continues paddling, working the clay into the curved wall.

At this point she goes over the whole form with a thin flexible slice of buffalo horn, smoothing away seams and any rough spots (I can't see any), at the same time lightly burnishing the surface.

Now the teapot is turned over and what was the bottom disk removed. The potter paddles this edge round also. The result is an almost spherical shape, beautifully rounded and balanced. She makes it all look so easy, but something (bitter experience, no doubt) tells me this is much harder than it appears under her skillful hands.

To make the top of the teapot with its perfectly fitting lid, she laminates two disks and with a compass-like tool cuts a circle from the top layer of clay only. That circle is set aside to become the lid; meanwhile the doubled disk is lightly dampened, set over the open center of the teapot body and firmly blended into the sides.

Again the whole surface is smoothed and cleaned with the buffalo horn. Several bodies are quickly made in this manner and set aside to stiffen slightly.

The potter takes up a teapot body made earlier and, working freehand, cuts a smaller circle out of the exposed lower slab, leaving a neatly formed gallery for the lid to rest on.

Inside the large jar, preformed handles and spouts remain the right texture for working until they're needed. The spout starts as a solid piece of clay which is hollowed with small loop tools and knives. The potter carefully works from either end toward the middle, holding the shape of the end just formed with a tapered plug of wood or plastic. The handle is similarly refined by hand from a prepared lug.

A wider wood plug stops the mouth of the teapot, maintaining its circular shape as the rest of the body is worked on. All signs of joins are smoothed away with the buffalo horn. By this time the clay has developed a dense, burnished surface from repeated goings-over with the horn.

I notice the potter keeps her piece of horn wet when not in use, and I am impressed by how flexible and responsive it is as she cleans and polishes. How can we obtain some of these marvelous tools?

This potter joins the seam of her handbuilt cylinder with only a drop of water and dampened fingers. On the table are several cut slabs and disks, wood forms and paddles, a plastic spray bottle, and a jar containing two pieces of water buffalo horn.

I switch potters to watch another pressing a slab into a fluted mold. Yes, she has a stack of such molds beside her, but the unmolded and partially finished teapots she has on a near-by shelf have all received painstaking, by-hand refinement. At the next work table someone else has a batch of melon-shaped teapots to which she is adding exquisitely delicate vines and leaves modeled between her fingers as I watch.

Humid air in the 90-plus heat leaves us dripping wet, yet the Chinese women at work here look cool and remarkably fashionable for potters in their workplace. They never sweat and their clothes are immaculate. In this intense humidity it seems amazing that the pots ever dry out; no one fusses about covering extra clay or parts, and the humidity prevents added elements like handles or leaves and flowers from drying too quickly. Environment obviously is an enormous influence on our ways of working.

Watermelon and Purple Sand

The director of this factory has prepared a small reception for us. In another high-ceilinged, airy room long tables have been arranged in a hollow rectangle. At intervals, plates of cut-up watermelon remind me how thirsty I am.

We sit around the tables, the director and chief artists are introduced, and we are invited to partake of the watermelon. It tastes wonderful. We begin to talk.

The senior artist is Mr. Xu Han Tang, whose specialty is teapots. Pottery is a family tradition for him, and he himself has worked in this place for 50 years. I am surprised to learn the teapots are not the only things made here; decorative pieces and perfume bottles are mentioned too.

The local clay, the "purple sand," is unique to this part of China. It is a body midway between earthenware and porcelain, the director tells us, i.e. a mid-range stoneware that is fired to 1200°C. The teapots are left unglazed, so that in use they gradually develop a rich patina on the interior from brewing tea, which adds to the flavor of the tea and is prized by connoisseurs, according to our hosts. Externally the unglazed surface absorbs oil from being handled, and with use grows more and more lustrous.

Though the teapot walls are thin, the clay holds the heat of the tea. The director adds that the miniature teapots are primarily for the Taiwanese market, where vintage teas are brewed in small but concentrated quantities. For their own consumption, the mainlanders say they prefer a somewhat larger size.

"Purple sand" comes from the mine as rock which must be processed into clay. First, it is left outside for two years to weather; exposure begins to break down the surface of the rock. The weathered rock is pulverized between grindstones and the resultant powder mixed with water, then pounded with great wooden mallets to develop the right texture and plasticity for working.

Today these steps are all done with machinery, and machine-processed clay is what nearly all the potters use. Only for the top artists, the master craftsmen, some clay is still prepared in the old way, by hand. The handmade clay is much better for working, we are told, but it's too expensive for everyone to use.

Someone asks about firing. Do they use wood kilns? The director smiles tolerantly. No, they use good modern kilns, fired with gas, diesel, or coal; the few wood-burning kilns left are only of historic interest.

We visit the factory's own collection of teapots on exhibit. Even though I know each design must have been made many hundreds of times, I am still stunned by the seemingly infinite variety of forms. Some are wholly organic, mimicking melons, leaves, branches or bamboo, many including insects or animals in the composition; others are miniatures of human-made artifacts like vessels and baskets; still others are pure, geometric form. In the course of this trip we see hundreds, probably thousands of these teapots, yet I never tire of looking at them.

When our group hits the factory showroom, we rival any feeding frenzy of sharks in our eagerness to acquire teapots of our own. What is for sale here is of much finer quality than what we've seen in tourist shops up to now. It's hard to choose among so many, but after losing one or two beauties to fellow sharks, I give up the idea of "budgeting" or careful selection and suddenly become a lot more decisive. "That one." I point. "And this, in front. And now, over here..." How much have I spent? Who knows? Who cares? They take MasterCard here.

Actually, the prices are ridiculously low. A few choice pieces, made by renowned master potters, might cost more than $100, but other very fine teapots can be had for under $20. And the small bowls and teacups are a dollar or less. Reality intervenes. I limit my buy to three teapots, and some cups, and a marvelous collection of nuts and seeds all made of clay and packed in a satin-lined box. It's hard for us to leave, but eventually, excited, hot and hungry, we all clamber aboard our bus to go to lunch. We bombard Peter with requests to find out where we can get some of the potters' tools we saw in use.

During lunch he makes some queries and locates our potters' tools - several street vendors with booths lined up next to a yard stacked with huge jars. The tool sellers are astounded. Not many tourists come to the teapot factories, and those that do apparently do not come to buy tools. Here are the half-round mallets, the slices of buffalo horn, the dividers and compasses, the tapered plugs and a baffling array of shaping, cutting and refining tools.

I want one of everything, but this is not practical. I pass up the mallets; they're heavy and my suitcase is rapidly getting heavier as it is. But buffalo horn - you can't find that at home. And the wood plugs, and these knife-shaped wood tools. Enough! I pay for my purchases and go off to look at the pots next door.

Both our guides, Peter and Chen, the national guide who shepherds us through the whole trip, are translating three different negotiations at once and looking harried. The vendors are quick to catch on. The longer we swarm around, the higher the prices go. I think they're having a good day.

The next stop is at a street corner where we get out to walk. Miniscule shops spill their wares onto the street. They're all selling pottery. Many, many teapots of all sizes, large utilitarian earthenware jars, garden planters and cook stoves are only some of the items on display. Since we are the only non-Chinese, indeed the only out-of-town visitors on the street, the customers for these shops must be the residents of the town. In addition to pots on sale individually, there are stacks of pots tied together with cord; even teapots are packaged this way.

Small shops in the pottery quarter of Dingshu are crammed with ceramic items of all sorts. Teapots in various sizes keep company here with planters, functional ware, and clay figurines.

We finally reach the canal. It's narrow, lined with boats and barges, and on the opposite bank, stretching as far as we can see, are endless wharves piled with pots waiting to be loaded onto barges. From here they go by canal to Lake Tai, cross the lake to Wuxi, where they meet the Grand Canal and travel to destinations all over China.

Stretching as far as the eye can see down the canal, the long wharves are piled high with pots waiting to be loaded onto barges on the first leg of their journey into the wider world.

The Grand Canal connects the Yangze and the Yellow River systems, providing swift and secure access to the main centers of modern and imperial China. From Hangzhou in the south to Beijing in the north it stretches more than 1000 miles. It was first completed during the Sui Dynasty, 581-617 A.D., as part of the Sui reunification of China and has been a crucial link for trade and communications ever since.

Along this canal are many old structures, some of which are houses where people live, others perhaps warehouses, while still others appear abandoned altogether. Walls incorporate pots used instead of or with bricks, and everywhere are tiny garden plots amid the pervasive rubble.

Old buildings along the canal incorporate whole and damaged pots into brick and stucco walls.

Friday, July 4

Today we are to visit the Yixing Green Glaze Factory, the Yixing Ceramics Museum, and the Shanjuan cave. It's raining out, though just as hot as yesterday. On the way to Dingshu, Peter notes that July 4 is a U.S. holiday. "It is your National Day, right? Today you celebrate. I will celebrate your National Day with you too. Tonight I will buy beer, we will drink lots of beer and get drunk. I will drink as much as possible to honor your National Day."

A Dragon Kiln

At the Green Glaze Factory, behind the modern buildings in a secluded green and leafy plot, we find the ancient climbing kiln which used to fire the factory's output. This is the "Dragon Kiln" we were promised, and standing at its base, watching it curve snake-like up the steep hill, I understand the name. It is easy to imagine it firing, with workers stoking the many ports, emitting smoke and flame up the hillside as if it were in truth a living dragon.

It was built as one continuous chamber with internal "steps" for stacking pots. There were three entrances for the potters to get inside to stack, and numerous stoke holes. It's about two-thirds dug into the hillside, one-third arched roof above ground level, and it extends for some 100 feet.

No one's fired it for at least 75 years; near the top one whole section has caved in completely. When we inquire about firing, our factory hosts dismiss the idea. Today they have modern tunnel kilns, where cars laden with pots roll on tracks into the kiln at one end and emerge at the other end with fired pots ready for shipping.

The Dragon Kiln took something like two weeks just to fire, never mind the amount of wood it needed.

The old dragon kiln at the Green Glaze Factory sprawls up the hill out of sight. Partway up the second stacking entrance is visible as a brick arch.

The Green Glaze is indeed a factory, mass-producing roof tiles and drainage pipes in addition to the jars, vats, braziers, planters and yes, lamp posts we see stacked everywhere awaiting shipping. We watch men working on large planters, pounding clay into rough slabs with giant mallets just like the small ones used for teapot slabs.

The finished slab is pressed (by hand) into a huge plaster mold, the two halves of the mold joined and the interior of the completed pot compressed and smoothed. When the clay is dry enough to handle, the mold pieces are removed.

With a large wooden mallet the potter flattens a slab of clay which he will press into a large plaster mold. Here the workers were making garden planters.

This is a job for two men at a time; these pots are easily three feet high and as big around.

Our tour includes a thorough inspection of the kilns, at least one of which is being fired. It is unbelievably hot, dusty and humid at the same time, and very dark. Dim forms move in the shadows, pulling giant pots on wheelbarrows here and there, tending the kiln, supervising the automated glazing of hundreds of roof tiles.

I watch one man glaze a jar nearly as tall as he is. He dunks a floor mop into a vat of glaze, then swishes it round the pot's interior several times. Then he fills a large watering can with glaze and splashes glaze over the outside. It takes several cans full to cover the whole pot, which is then left to dry before being rolled into the kiln it sits in front of.

After escaping from this inferno of industry, we visit the workshop and studio of the master potter, a small air-conditioned haven within a larger room, where the potter and one apprentice are painstakingly decorating ornamental pots with designs in relief.

Each has a palette of different colored, very soft clays, from which design elements are modeled by hand and applied to the pot. The young woman apprentice is working on a dragon. Every detail, scale, claw, frill and flourish, is formed from a bit of clay between her fingers and carefully added to the picture.

The young woman working here is already a skilled artist. She has nearly finished this part of her training, and will go next to an art and design college for her final degree. She takes tiny pieces from the plate of soft clay beside her to shape every detail of the dragon, using her fingers for tools.

In the outer room, without air-conditioning, other, less advanced students are at work on simpler designs. Near the stairwell we see a dozen or so plates with dragons rising in full relief from their surfaces. Amazed, I think of the work and skill that went into that clay pavilion by the pond at our hotel.

Later that afternoon we do indeed visit a cave. The road winds up into the hills, where we go through small settlements and some beautiful bamboo forest before reaching the parking lot outside the entrance to the Shanjuan Cave. I'm not in general thrilled at the prospect of scrambling through narrow passages deep underground and feel apprehensive about this excursion.

On the other side of a formal stone gateway there is a ticket office. Past that a neat paved path disappears into garden shrubbery. One young couple comes in the same time we do. I look at the Chinese girl's clothes and feel reassured about this cave. She is wearing a filmy yellow dress with short fluttery sleeves and delicate sandals with heels. If she can do this, so can I.

Up some stairs and into another building, then down some stairs, and we are in a cave. Well, what looks like a cross between a Las Vegas nightclub and a cave. The floor is smooth and paved, but wet. The walls and ceiling are living rock, with very ancient Buddhist carvings here and there, but they are illuminated by red and green and purple spotlights. The effect is overdressed Christmas tree, and yet the place still has a presence.

A damp, steep staircase cut from the rock brings us to a lower cave through which an underground stream flows. At a pier also cut from the rock of the cave two flat-bottomed boats are tied; these will carry us downstream to the cave's lower exit. There are fewer colored lights down here, the shadows are very deep, and the river curves away beyond our sight into darkness, "through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea."

As we drift away from shore, my head is full of images from all the tales of subterranean adventure I've ever read. Quietly I recite the rest of "Kublai Khan" to myself, but my attempt at mood is doomed. Everyone is laughing loudly and yelling about bats.

The river journey ends all too soon. I'd like to go back in and look again, but there's no time. Heroically, I refrain from entertaining the whole bus with Coleridge all the way back to our hotel.

Once again I feel I've been walking into legend and come face to face with universal myth. What an extraordinary country is China!

Our first week ends as we leave Yixing the next day. Our faithful little tour bus takes us back to Wuxi, where we have lunch and spend the afternoon before boarding a train for our overnight journey to Jingdezhen, the city of porcelain, some 500 or so miles farther south. The train itself is another adventure, and Jingdezhen also is full of wonders.

To be continued...

Jean Silverman is a potter and former archaeologist who has had a life-long interest in Chinese literature and art.

For anyone interested in reading more about China and specifically about Yixing wares, the following books may be helpful.

Chinese history

Conrad Schirokauer. A Brief History of Chinese Civilization. Harcourt, Brace & Co. (San Diego, New York, London, Toronto, 1991).

Nathan Sivin, consulting ed. The Contemporary Atlas of China. Houghton Mifflin Company (Boston, 1988).

Yixing pottery

(Publication information is often incomplete.)

Janet DeBoos. "A Workshop in Yixing," Ceramics Art and Perception, Issue no. 27, 1997, pp. 90-93.

Terry Gess. "How Do You Cook the Moon?" Ceramics Monthly, June/July/August 1997, p. 43 and ff.

Gu Jingzhou, ed. Connoisseurship of Dark Red Yixing Pottery.

"Yixing Teapots Western Style," Ceramics Monthly, October 1997, p. 14.

K.S. Lo. Stonewares of Yixing. Published in Hong Kong for Sotheby's Publications, 1986. Also in Great Britain, by Philip Wilson, Publisher; New York, Harper & Row. Out of print.

The Charm of Dark Red Pottery Teapots. Published in China by the Yilin Press, 1992, under the supervision of the Ceramic Industry Corporation.

Yixing Purple Clay Ware. Published in Hong Kong by the Cultural Relics Publishing House and The Woods Publishing Co., 1991.