One Potter's Tour of China (Part 2)

by Jean Silverman

This article first appeared in Studio Potter Network Newsletter, Volume 11, Number 1 (Spring 1998).
Copyright © 1998 by Studio Potter. All rights reserved.
This is part two of a two-part article.

The Azzaro "Potter's Tour of China," from June 27 to July 18 of last summer, was the brainchild of Sam Azzaro, who teaches ceramics at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. After his first trip to China a few years before, Sam was inspired to organize another, geared to the particular interests of potters and pottery lovers. (See stories in Studio Potter Network Newsletter, vol. 9, nos. 1 and 2, 1996.)

We finally took off from JFK airport on June 27, 1997 - a miscellaneous gathering of 14 potters, teachers, and students from New England and Wisconsin. Four other members of the tour would join us in Shanghai; our group of 15 women and three men traveled together for three weeks with good humor and enthusiasm in search of pots, potters, kilns and potteries, taking in the occasional, non-ceramic tourist attraction as well.

Our first week was spent in Shanghai and Yixing; a full account can be found in the Studio Potter Network Newsletter, vol. 10, no. 2, Fall 1997. Here we pick up the story again as we leave Yixing and its wonderful teapots behind.

Saturday, July 5

After breakfast we stuff ourselves and all our teapots into the tour bus and retrace our steps to Wuxi, where we are scheduled to pick up an overnight train to the city of Jingdezhen, some 500 miles to the south. As always, the day is hot, damp and grey, though not actually raining for once.

We drive back through the lush, green farmland. Wuxi is a prosperous city on the shores of Lake Tai, linked by the Grand Canal to the Yangtze and Yellow river systems and thus to most of China. As it was a few days earlier, the lake is hidden by mist and cloud allowing only glimpses of shimmery grey water.

Our first stop is an elegant hotel, where we make a pit stop, raid its well-stocked shop for postcards, drinking water, chocolate and other necessities of life, and collect our local guide for the day.

The second stop is in a park on the Grand Canal, where we board a "dragon boat" for a tour along part of the canal. According to our guide, this channel was cut in modern times, bypassing an older stretch of the canal. Certainly it is very wide and very crowded with boats and long strings of barges moving in both directions, riding low in the water under their burdens of cargo. Barges and houseboats by the dozens are tied up two and three deep to the quays. I catch glimpses of life on board: clotheslines full of laundry strung across decks, someone cooking over a portable stove, men smoking by the wheelhouse. Without any visible activity the waterfront still gives the feeling of a bustling center of commerce.

Houseboats and barges tied up along the Grand Canal in Wuxi

Our dragon boat is a pleasure craft - rectangular, flat-bottomed, dark red with bright yellow roofs over cabin and wheelhouse sporting decorative up-turned eaves with parades of animal figures along their ridges. All 18 of us crowd the narrow deck, jockeying for the best photographic angles. Our pilot steers through the maze of barges and ships; two other crew members offer to sell us refreshments and souvenirs, but we are more interested in seeing life on the water. Though invisible behind the haze, the sun is strong, and the air feels gritty.

Below, the cabin is one long room, elegantly furnished with carved wood chairs, enormous embroidered pictures and an inlaid ebony screen. Low carved tables stretch down the center. Red lacquer columns support the cabin roof, each entwined by a golden dragon coiling upward amid golden waves and clouds. Here I find our Chinese guides, sensibly cool, clean, and relaxed. Little by little the rest of our party appears, escaping the mid-day heat.

After lunch we visit the Jichang Garden, the grounds of a mansion originally built in the Ming dynasty. In places only the perimeter wall separates garden from city street, yet we might be in remote countryside instead of a busy city center, so peaceful is it in here.

These gardens have been designed with curving paths, cliff-like walls of ornamental rocks, small pools and larger ponds with airy, gazebo-like structures, so that a small area encompasses a wide variety of views and moods. Pebble mosaics decorate the paths under our feet. Though the gardens are full of people - young couples, families enjoying their day off, elders playing cards in the gazebos - they do not seem at all crowded. We ramble under the trees, enjoying this quiet interlude before heading to the train station.

A Ming dynasty gate in the perimeter wall of the Jichang Garden in Wuxi

On the way we stop to pick up "boxed lunches" to take on board in lieu of dinner. At the station we wait in a large, air-conditioned and mostly empty waiting room, while Chen sorts out our tickets. We are riding in "soft sleepers," four bunks to a compartment, provided with pillows, blankets, soft enough mattresses and a thermos of boiled hot water, as well as ferociously cold air-conditioning not amenable to adjustment. This is first-class travel in China; boarding the train at the wrong end, we get an unintended tour of how ordinary people travel - on tight-packed wooden benches in bare-bones, un-air-conditioned cars. Passengers stare at our group of luggage-toting giants.

From Wuxi to Jingdezhen will be a 14-hour trip, nearly all of it in darkness, to my immense frustration. It is already dusk as we pull out of the station.

My three roommates are much taller than I and find our bunks a few inches too short for comfort. The sleepers are scaled to Chinese, not American proportions. We stow our belongings and explore, as everyone else seems to be doing too. Lots of going back and forth between compartments, much laughter as the adventurous figure out how to reach their upper berths (rudimentary hand and footholds by the door).

Chen comes by, checking on his increasingly unruly charges, and suggests that we keep the compartment doors closed and locked, especially during the night. China is a safe country, he assures us, but nevertheless, on the train, you can't be too careful. Slowly we settle down.

The train stops often during the night, at stations and, in the manner of trains everywhere, in the midst of deserted landscape for no apparent reason, but the darkness is impenetrable whenever I wake enough to take an interest. Sometime during the night our air-conditioning dies. I sleep restlessly; in the morning my companions somewhat resentfully claim not to have slept at all.

Sunday, July 6

Chen comes down the corridor, knocking on doors to say the next stop is ours. Feeling unwashed and rumpled, we gather our scattered possessions and thankfully prepare to disembark. On the platform our Jingdezhen guide is waving a blue and white triangular C.I.T.S. flag; we are not hard to pick out amid the dense crowd, since we appear to be the only Westerners in sight.

A delay. Consternation, then panic. Sandy has lost her passport! The guide, with Sandy in tow, races back to the train, explains; official-looking persons with stern faces consult; they re-board the train, and emerge some minutes later triumphant. The lost has been found; the errant document had dropped behind some cushions on the bunk. The rest of us nervously double-check our own papers for the 17th time in five minutes. This is one of the more nerve-wracking incidents in our travels.

Loaded into two very small busses, we are driven to our hotel, a large edifice among tall trees, fronting an ornamental lake complete with pavilion and paddle boats. The hotel lobby is dim and cavernous in dark marble. A tall (as in over six feet) polychrome vase beside the hotel shop is the first thing to catch my eye; looking about, I see other gargantuan vases at various points in the gloom. We are indeed in the "city of porcelain."

Harriet and I, roommates for the tour, have a window facing the lake. Now, several stories up and closer to the tree tops, I am astonished to find them filled with large white birds roosting or flying circles in the warm rain. Here again is a living painting, "Cranes Flying among Clouds." Except these are not cranes but egrets. Still, why quibble? It's a beautiful living painting and a fine introduction to Jingdezhen.

This morning we are going to visit the Ceramic and Art Research Institute. Our guide, who is one of the loveliest young women I've ever seen, has trouble with English. I find her exceptionally hard to understand. As a result, here in Jingdezhen I am perpetually confused about where I am, and spend each evening trying to figure out where we've been, with the help of our printed itinerary (which we never follow), and my traveling companions.

The busses carry us out of the city into a green and hilly countryside. We eventually turn down a narrow drive, pass through a gate in a sinuous, whitewashed wall roofed in grey tile, and pull up on an emerald lawn. The rain is steady but gentle.

Getting out of the bus, I think this must be one of the most beautiful places in the world. The white wall, its curving profile echoing the curves of the hills beyond, encloses a complex of very old buildings, downhill from where we stand the pottery workshops and showroom, up the slight incline of the lawn, a wood structure housing an immense, old-fashioned wood-firing kiln. Mist and clouds drift among the forested hills; I can hear only the gentle rain and the voice of a stream that runs across the velvety lawn.

The kiln shed housing an old wood-burning kiln at the Ceramic and Art Research Institute outside of Jingdezhen

A professor from the Institute takes us through another gate into the pottery area itself. Here several men are working at wheels, one throwing thick-walled teapot bodies off the hump very fast, another bowls. Someone else is trimming bottles, carving the vessel form out of the roughly-thrown blank, shaving the walls down by as much as an inch or more as I watch, releasing the turned foot, the curved belly from the original mass of bone-dry clay. At another table a young man is carving a design on a large, bone-dry vase with a tool like a miniature chisel.

The clay they are working with is very yellow, not at all like the creamy white porcelain we are used to, but yes, we're told, it is porcelain, the famous porcelain of Jingdezhen. The wheels are Chinese-style, their shaft set in a trench, the wheelhead level with the potter's bench. The potter's feet rest on the worktable surrounding the wheel at bench level. These wheels are powered by electricity, the only visible anachronism here. They have two speeds - stop and very fast.

Freshly thrown bowls in the workshop of the Ceramic and Art Research Institute

The pottery is laid out like a medieval cloister, a central grassy square left open to the sky surrounded by roofed working areas, their floors dug two feet or so below ground level. We walk along a brick, rather wet and slippery berm, mostly out of the rain that has begun to come down harder. Water streams off the grey roof tiles into a system of gutters and drain pipes that carry it out into the courtyard, where it splashes into huge barrels and spills over onto the grass. Some of the barrels appear to contain recycled clay. The earthen floor under the potters is completely dry. The only sound is the splashing water and the humming wheels.

I'm ready to move my studio to this enchanted place immediately and dedicate my life to the creation of beauty. Here, surely, one could do no less.

We swarm around the potters at work, taking pictures, trying to ask questions, with great difficulty managing not to pick up pots, tools, clay. My fingers yearn toward the clay so hard it almost hurts not to touch it. Afraid to seem impolite, I feel too shy even to ask if I may.

Someone finally explains that we too are potters. The teapot thrower gets up and grins, gestures for someone to take his place at the wheel. Joe, one of our three students, volunteers, and scrunches his tall frame into position. It is clear, watching his efforts, that the clay is very soft and rather short, and the novel throwing posture takes getting used to, but he does produce a bowl. When he gets up, Gail gives it a try. She squashes her pot almost before it's formed, but still...

We go to inspect the kiln, which is built, I later learn, in the style of the earliest porcelain kilns, a long, egg-shaped oval of hard brick, with a vast firebox under the floor of the single firing chamber. I understand it to be a reconstruction of this ancient type of kiln. We ask how often it gets fired; not often, perhaps once a year, is the answer. The cost in wood alone is enormous. The kiln shed, also made of wood, has two levels; the basement gives access to the firebox, the upper floor, supported by massive timbers, to the kiln chamber itself.

And now we will go to make our own pots. For one glorious moment it seems as if we will get to handle clay at last, but no. We get to decorate pots, plates to be exact. A footbridge over the little stream brings us to a simple, one-roomed building with white walls and delicate, cinnabar-red woodwork. Inside, a long table is laid out with sets of dishes containing overglaze pigments, thinner, and brushes. One of Institute artists demonstrates the technique, how to mix thinner and pigment to the desired thickness, how to shade our line with the loaded brush, how to add other colors cleanly. He paints a branch of plum blossoms to illustrate.

None of us has any real familiarity with china paints, and we're all feeling the effects of our restless night on the train. Inspiration is in short supply. We are each given two small plates. Assistants hover helpfully around, trying to direct our efforts, dismayed at our often unconventional approaches to the medium. In the end we are none of us too pleased with our results, but turn them over to our beaming hosts anyway, who promise to deliver the fired work to our hotel in a day or two.

In the afternoon we go out of the city in a different direction to visit "The Ancient Porcelain Factory." Here we find a pottery very like the one we saw that morning, the graceful, white-walled buildings, the enclosed work areas around open courts, and, outside, steep, lush hills glowing green against grey sky and pearly mists.

The Ancient Porcelain Factory sits among misty green mountains just outside the city of Jingdezhen

We see potters throwing bowls, this time on traditional wheels that are turned by hand with a stick. As soon as one long ware board is filled, an assistant whisks it away to the drying rack while the potter sets another in its place and begins again. There is also an old man glazing board after board of finished bowls. He sits before a huge vat of glaze, and, holding a bowl at the end of a flat stick, dips it into the glaze, precisely to the rim and no farther, lifts it out, slides it off the stick and picks up another, moving without hurry but quickly and efficiently, with the effortless skill of a lifetime's work. We're a long way from the 20th century city beyond these walls.

Glazing bowls by hand at the Ancient Porcelain Factory, Jingdezhen

This sense of being taken back in time does not happen by chance. The Ancient Porcelain Factory has, in fact, been painstakingly transported to this site, building by building, and reconstructed to show visitors how a pottery factory of the Ming period functioned before modern technology. It is a living history museum, a kind of colonial Williamsburg, Chinese style.

The grounds here are extensive, but not everything is open to view. It seems to be a project still in progress. We walk deeper into the complex of buildings to a small ceramic museum in a rather shabby old temple dating from the Qing dynasty, a mere 300 years back. I am most interested in the display of early pots discovered at various sites in this region, especially the Sung period celadons in the celestial iron blue characteristic of this region.

Walking farther down a path through woods of dripping pines and thick green mosses (the rain keeps raining), we arrive in a clearing before a truly monstrous kiln shed that shelters a kiln large enough to house a family of ten in comfort. A stack of firewood outside has been built up in the shape of a cottage and equals one in size.

A "cottage" built of stacked firewood

The kiln building is constructed of wood and bamboo, and like the one we saw this morning has two levels. The pillars supporting the upper floor are simply whole tree trunks set on square stone plinths. The great chimney stretches up through the roof, its bricks laid in a spiral reaching towards the clouds. This whole structure is some 600 years old, and it has been moved here from its original site to preserve it. A single light bulb dangling from a long cord in the center of the kiln chamber tells us this kiln is never fired. Discarded saggars lie about in piles within.

Monday, July 7

Today we devote quite a bit of time to trying to cash traveler's checks, as some of us are running out of money. This proves to be more of a challenge than expected. Neither our hotel nor, apparently, the local bank has any idea of what to do. With some embarrassment, we are reduced to accepting Chen's offer of temporary loans. He at least is well prepared. [Traveler's tip: beyond the major tourist centers in China, it's a good idea to carry plenty of Chinese currency.]

Eventually we turn in to the Jiangxi Ceramic Museum, or as it's named in the brochure, the Exhibition Hall of Jingdezhen Ceramics. Exhibits are in two parts, the historical and the contemporary. We head first for the historical section, which could stand to have more light but does contain pots going back to the early Song. I particularly admire a small, melon-shaped celadon teapot and a vase in the form of a green pepper. There are also delicate bowls, tripod pots and jars with layers of figurines arranged about their shoulders. Photography is not allowed.

Across the main hall are several galleries, better lit with new displays, that show off the products of today's porcelain industry. During our stay in Jingdezhen we visit a lot of different factories and exhibitions of contemporary work. Technically it's perfect; aesthetically I find it dull.

In this city, pottery has been a major industry since the Han dynasty. We do not encounter studio potters working on their own in private studios or taking their pots through all the stages of production themselves. Craftsmen have been highly specialized in their jobs for hundreds of years. The first European visitors to these porcelain factories noted that one piece might pass through 70 different pairs of hands, each craftsman performing one small step along the way from raw clay to final product. This assembly-line system was entrenched by the early Ming; it may explain why the Song and earlier wares have more life and personality than the later work.

We return to the Ceramic and Art Institute after lunch to meet with Professor Jia Yu, who will talk about the history of Jingdezhen porcelains. Although the rain is coming down as persistently as ever, two of the non-potters among us (Joann is a photographer) elect to leave the bus in a village on the road to explore and take pictures; they'll walk to the Institute grounds.

The room where we painted plates today serves as our seminar room. The long table is covered with a clean white cloth and set with beautifully painted blue-and-white mugs made in the workshops here. The stream outside provides a musical background.

When we sit down, green tea is served, and Professor Jia begins his talk. He speaks no English, so we wait while our guides translate for us. The translation process is filled with frustration for everyone, as we all have technical questions about such things as clay bodies, glaze formulation, kiln types and firing temperatures, but lack the Chinese vocabulary, while the guides, who are not potters of course, lack both the English and the Chinese needed. Impromptu question and answer exchanges seem to throw our Chinese hosts, who are clearly used to much more formal instructional relationships.

Nevertheless, Professor Jia spends more than two hours with us, patiently struggling to close the communications gap. What we all share is a passion for clay, and that at least needs no translation.

On the road we meet up with Joann and Jan, drenched but happy, having taken lots of pictures, met a water buffalo, and entertained the village generally.

Tuesday, July 8

We go to see a water hammer, which unfortunately is not actually in operation today. This is the device used for processing clay before the days of modern machinery. A system of water wheels in a stream power two huge wooden mallets that crush the "porcelain stone" to powder. Lying about are chips of "porcelain stone" and a heap of processed clay. I take a sample of each, which I carry back to New Hampshire in a small porcelain box. Here again we are thwarted by language difficulties. What exactly is this porcelain stone? Our guide doesn't know.

Before the days of modern machinery, water hammers like these pulverized raw materials for clay and glazes

Another stop somewhere on the outskirts of the city for the Hutian Ancient Kiln Site. Our busses park along a suburban road, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. An elderly caretaker in blue Mao pajamas (one of only two people wearing this once ubiquitous uniform that I saw during the whole trip) turns up to unlock a round gate in the old wall across the road. I'm reminded of a hobbit house.

An overgrown path across a stretch of empty land brings us into a square with old-fashioned, rather shabby but attractive houses. Beyond the square a narrow road leads uphill past more houses. The few people about stop to look at us curiously. We continue upwards, cutting off the road onto another track, and eventually end up at a large overgrown foundation hole that is the site of one of the oldest of the Jingdezhen kilns, active from the Five Dynasties to the middle of the Ming (mid 10th century to 16th approximately). Brush and scrubby trees obscure any detail of plan or construction that might be left.

We've also toured a bewildering number of places engaged in the production of porcelain, some as training schools, some as factories, but since we mainly see the showrooms and meet neither students nor working potters, it can be hard to tell the difference, given our language difficulties here.

Much more fun and rewarding is our last stop of the day, in the city center at the entrance to the "Street of Porcelain." This is a street market of pottery. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of vendors have set out displays of pots, mostly factory-made porcelains in the local style, everything from toothpick holders to giant vases. A few also have small displays of stoneware pieces with dark brown or blue-green glazes. Pedestrians battle for passing room with carts, motorcycles, and heavily laden, three-wheeled delivery carts. Behind the outdoor tables are tiny shops containing even more pots; some even offer Yixing teapots for sale.

Jingdezhen's open-air Street of Porcelain

Our group scatters and is absorbed by the bustle of the market, but all of us attract attention. Except for one or two other guests at our hotel, we appear to be the only Westerners in the city, as exotic here as kangaroos on the streets of New York.

We decide to walk from the market back to the hotel, since the rain has temporarily stopped. The only scary part is crossing the street - the traffic is dense, fast and no holds barred. On the way we browse in a couple of shops, but there isn't much variety in the porcelains on view, in either quality or concept. In both respects they are competent but not exciting, not after looking at all those Tang and Sung pieces in the museums.

Throwing vases in a modern handcraft workshop

Thursday, July 10

Yesterday, after visiting the Dragon Pearl Pagoda, from which we had panoramic views over the city and its many smoking kiln chimneys, a group of us returned to the Street of Porcelain, looking for temmoku and Chun glazed bowls. I think I'm crazy to be carrying pots around in my luggage, but the lure of Chinese pots found in China is too strong for mere common sense. When we pack up to leave for the train, nearly everyone is tenderly guarding at least one or two pieces more than when we arrived. In addition to our painted plates, of course.

The carved and painted dome, the "Pearl", of the Dragon Pearl Pagoda, Jingdezhen
(photo by Joann O'Hare)

We were hoping to escape without them, but while we are checking out of the hotel, someone from the Institute delivers them, each neatly packed in its own, somewhat used, silk-covered box. Firing has not improved them. Some actually look not too bad; some of us are better painters than others. No matter. We cannot be so rude as to leave them behind, but I plan to abandon mine as soon as it's convenient, and I am not alone.

In the afternoon before the train we go to see two more factories. The first is a state-of-the-art, government- run, mass production factory. The equipment has just been installed from Germany, so automated that the operator need only monitor the machine that forms, cleans, or glazes. The most amazing thing to me is that the pieces are not slip-cast, as I expected, but begin as bone-dry powder which is then pressed into the mold with such force that it actually bonds together. This is obviously the Rolls-Royce of factories, clean, well lighted, relatively quiet.

The second is described as one of the new, privately owned businesses that are starting to appear in the new China. It looks a lot more like a real pottery, with men throwing pots while their assistants wedge clay, and men and women painting by hand the finished pots with cobalt underglaze. The pots in the showroom are blue and white and polychrome wares, very well crafted, completely traditional. Off in a corner is a small display of blue celadon bowls with incised interiors, reproductions of the Sung ware I've been admiring in museums. Another bowl joins my collection. But, I rationalize, this really is special. The Jingdezhen porcelains look nothing like celadons made at home, however lovely. This is a Chinese celadon.

Our second and, thankfully, final overnight train ride north to Nanjing is less comfortable than the first. Suffice it to say that we survive to stumble into the sublimely luxurious hotel where we get to wash and have breakfast before heading out to visit Nanjing's main tourist attraction, the mausoleum of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. The park is beautifully landscaped, with lots of pine trees full of singing cicadas, and flower beds along the walks.

It's also packed with visitors in spite of the early hour. There are a few groups of school children, many more families. While I'm waiting for the rest of our tour to return from climbing the several million steps to the actual resting place itself, one family group asks to take a picture of their little girl with me. Surprised, I agree. The child is dubious but shyly obliging. Everyone smiles while the father takes several snapshots. Expressions of gratification all around in universal sign language as we say goodbye.

We get only a little more than an hour in the Nanjing Museum, to my lasting regret. It's a wonderful museum full of treasures, including a jade burial suit made to preserve the soul of an Eastern Han prince. On the main floor a series of exhibits illustrates aspects of daily life in ancient China: textile production, agriculture, food preparation and serving, transportation on land and water. Neolithic sites from the area around Lake Tai are extensively documented and reconstructed in another series of exhibition rooms on the lower level. Unfortunately for me, these newer displays had no signage except in Chinese, and there was no one around to translate.

All too soon we are hustled off to lunch, a Ming emperor's tomb, and a visit to a store for traditional Chinese medicine, before riding out to the spiffy new airport and our flight west to Xian.

For most of the flight, dense cloud cover completely obscures the landscape below. Finally, as we enter the drier climate zone of Shaangxi province, the clouds break up and I can see the shape of the land. We fly over rugged, uncultivated regions, then over plains divided into large fields punctuated by small villages. Occasional patches of bright green interrupt the dusty brown of high summer. It's a complete contrast to the watery lands of rice and mist we've just left.

Xian - capital of the first emperors

Even ten years ago, Xian had long since faded from its early glory to provincial obscurity, but as Chinese archaeology of the last half century has revealed more and more of the ancient past, as China in recent years has opened itself to tourism, so Xian has flourished. A visit to the famous buried army of Qin is now as obligatory a stop on the tourist route as the Great Wall, that other monument of China's first emperor.

In the 1950's excavations at Banpo in the eastern suburbs of Xian uncovered an extensive Neolithic village (from ca. 4000 B.C.) near what was the ancient course of the Yellow River. Banpo is still an important site, though many more have since been found.

In 1974 peasants digging a well first discovered the terracotta army which guarded the mausoleum of China's first emperor and which has become one of the wonders of the world. The flood of visitors to see this and the other antiquities of the region has turned Xian into a cosmopolitan city with a new international airport, luxury hotels, fine restaurants, and a relentless crush of souvenir sellers.

The city's heyday was during the Tang dynasty, when, as Chang 'an, it was the capital of the Tang empire. The original city was laid out on a grid system oriented toward the four compass points and completely enclosed by a city wall, most of which was rebuilt in the early Ming and is still standing today.

From a tourist's point of view it is one of the most comfortable, as well as most interesting places to visit in China. We found ourselves in a palatial hotel that seemed even more luxurious by contrast with our last, to say nothing of the train. We ate in a couple of real restaurants; one was a "dinner theater" that offered a performance of Tang period music and dance. And we hadn't seen so many Caucasian faces since leaving home. By the time we left Jingdezhen I'd almost forgotten we didn't look Chinese.

Friday, July 11

The three days we have here are not nearly enough to take in all there is to see. In one day we visit both Banpo and the Qin army museum; either one, but especially the Qin army, really requires a full day to see everything. The Banpo museum has extensive, very informative exhibits with hundreds of fascinating pots to look at, in addition to the excavated portion of the village that is open to tourists. There are three areas of excavation, the residential quarter, a cemetery, and a separate pottery-making quarter with the foundations of at least six kilns.

A Neolithic water jar from Banpo, in Xian
(museum photo)

It is nearly impossible to describe the impact of the buried army, where archaeological investigations are proceeding slowly, with great care. Only a small portion of what is actually there has been exposed, yet even this portion is breathtaking in its scope. The figures, men and horses, are life-size; each soldier, from general to infantry, has been individualized by details of dress and features. The impression is that this great army is merely frozen in time for an instant, and in the next moment will take in its collective breath and continue the solemn march interrupted so long ago. Individual figures are exhibited at eye level in glass cases where it's possible to see them close to. Coming upon such a figure, spotlit in the dark museum hall, is like coming face to face with the living man himself.

Horses and foot soldiers from the Qin terracotta army are life size and modeled in great detail
(museum photo)

A bronze chariot with charioteer and horses, not quite life size, is one of two found with the buried army
(museum photo)

Saturday, July 12

An hour's drive from Xian through grey drizzle brings us to Tongchuan, a depressingly grimy industrial town where we have come to see the site of the Yaozhou Kilns, one of the major centers for pottery from the early Tang through the Sung dynasties. Production continued, though diminishing in importance, in the Yuan until it stopped altogether in the early Ming. During the Sung, Yaozhou was famous for its carved porcelains with celadon glaze, which at this site is a dark, yellow to olive green transparent glaze, quite unlike the misty blue-greens from Jingdezhen.

A brand new museum houses all the excavation finds from the area, while across the road is the site itself. Like all the archaeological sites we visited in China, the excavated area has been housed in a substantial building of its own, where raised walkways for viewing surround the remains to keep visitors at a distance and prevent damage. Given the volume of visitors the sites attract, this is the only reasonable way to keep them intact, but I badly miss the more intimate experience of walking through the ruins, standing among the foundations, seeing with the mind's eye what the ancient inhabitants might have seen.

The foundations of a Sung kiln at the Yaozhou kiln site, where fine porcelains were produced during the Tang and Sung dynasties

Both buildings are locked and deserted. Our Xian guide, a lively young woman who has asked us to call her C.C., finally locates someone with a key to let us into the excavation site, but it appears that we won't be able to get into the museum at all. After coming all this way (not just the hour's drive from Xian, but the 10,000-odd miles from home), I'm not the only one who's dismayed and disappointed. However, we do see foundations of workshops and kilns that look remarkably like the restored potteries in Jingdezhen, with the same arrangement of open courtyard and surrounding sunken work areas. Vats for holding clay or glaze are still in situ as they were found. The earliest kiln is the largest; it dates from the Tang and was fired with wood. The Sung kilns are somewhat smaller and were fired by coal, the forests in this dry terrain having been depleted early on.

In cases around the walkways are some of the pots found here, tri-color and dark-glazed Tang wares, the famous Sung celadons. As we are ready to leave, someone else shows up with reproductions for sale, olive green bowls with carved and molded decoration. But before meeting us this morning, C.C. has managed to find a book in English on this site, with lots of photographs. It's heavier than the little bowls, but more comprehensive, and she says she will try to get more copies for us to buy.

We stop along the road back to Xian so we can get out of the bus and take pictures. We are crossing a hilly region west of the city where a stream bed of the Wei River, a tributary of the Yellow, lies. Terraces line the hills; an isolated farmstead sits in the valley among its fields. The landscape appears deserted, until suddenly a small crowd emerges from the farm buildings and stares, looking up at our bus and all of us who are standing by the side of the road on top of this hill staring down at them.

A farmstead along the highway northwest of Xian

After lunch we go to the Xianyang Museum, only one of several we might have seen. It contains many finds from tombs and early palaces in the area, dating from the Warring States period through the Tang. Again, there is not nearly enough time to see everything properly; I feel I am missing half of what's here as I rush past so much art and history.

The major exhibit, however, is hard to miss - 11 large glass cases displaying yet another terracotta army of infantry and cavalry, 3000 strong. These figures were found in 1965, buried in front of the tomb of an important general from the early (Western) Han, and are probably not much more than 50 years later than the Qin army. About one third life-size, they have been made with care and elaborately painted, but lack the vitality of pose and individuality of face that give the others their compelling presence. Still, they are an impressive sight, massed together in their ranks just as they had been buried two thousand years ago.

Beijing - palaces and pandas

We leave Xian, reluctantly on my part, for Beijing after spending our last day at the better known monuments - the city wall, the Bell Tower, the Big Wild Goose Pagoda - but to my surprise I enjoy Beijing. Though under construction on every block, like every city we've been to, there is more of the old architecture left to give the streets character, yet at the same time the embassies, glittering stores and well-dressed residents contribute to a refreshingly cosmopolitan air.

We do a number of fun, if touristy things, like going to a Chinese opera (condensed) and attending the flag ceremony in Tiananmen Square, where wonderful paper kites - hawks, dragons, dragonflies - soar in the setting sun while a growing crowd waits for the honor guard to march out to lower the flag. We spend some hours on Liulichang, a street of antique buildings full of very attractive tourist traps, and several people, more energetic than I, go out later to a real street market.

By now the pottery focus of our group has become softer; the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven are scenic enough, and I would have liked to spend at least half a day at the zoo (yes, there are plenty of pandas, both the large black and white versions and the lesser known, smaller red pandas with their long ringed tails and bushy white eyebrows), but our best day in Beijing is one we spend out of the city, going to the Great Wall.

The Great Wall climbs along mountain ridges north of Beijing

Along the way we stop at the tomb of Wan Li, the last Ming emperor, in a grove of ancient pines among the foothills of the Yan Mountains north of the capital. The only good thing about the underground burial vault is that it's a lot cooler than the outside summer heat.

The mountains are green with young trees. Chen tells us every tree has been planted as part of a massive reforestation plan. Obviously, a people who could conceive and then build the Great Wall will think nothing of planting a mere few million trees.

The Wall, when we finally reach it, is as crowded as a rush hour subway. It takes considerable determination and stamina to hike along it far enough for the crush to thin out. We hike along the top of the wall, which is extremely steep as it follows the topmost ridges of the mountain chain regardless of terrain. Far into the horizon's mists, it can be seen defining the shape of the land, a line drawn long ago between the civilized and the barbarian, between order and chaos. No matter that it was breached time and time again; the fact of it's being there at all is what counts.

An ornamental brick dates from the Ming repairs and reconstruction of the Great Wall

Friday, July 18

Our last dinner together before separating on our various ways home was held last night at a restaurant on a lake in one of Beijing's many parks, where we shared jokes, gifts and memories of our three-week adventure.

Now we board our bus for the final trip to the airport. Chen takes us all the way to Immigration, and we are sorry to say goodbye. He's been an excellent guide, experienced, cheerful, calm, and always helpful. And he has a sense of humor, an essential prerequisite for the job. After listening to his many funny stories about other tours he's guided, I can only wonder what he'll be telling his next group about the bunch of crazy, headstrong potters who dragged him around dusty workrooms, never did what they were told, and would not stop buying teapots. I hope he's got some good stories out of us.

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

The major dynasties of China: