30th April – Jingdezhen to Hongcun

This morning we are being shown around the Sculpture Factory which is one of the china production areas of the city.  Tony has a couple of friends, Leigh & Alexandria, who come to Jingdezhen for 6 weeks a year to make their pottery and then ship it back to Australia to sell in their gallery in East Malvern. They meet us at the hotel & then escort us to the area where their studio is.

We first visit an antique market, which has an eclectic mix of items for sale, some of which may be antiques.  There is a lot of broken pieces of china, coins, china objects of all kinds including jewellery made from china beads.

We enter the Sculpture Factory through the front gate.  All the buildings in this area used to be state owned until they abandoned it and the buildings fell into disrepair.  The area has now evolved as the best place to learn how to make china in the country and there are many students who sell their handmade items in the market.  The market is packed with people buying china.

There is a youth hostel inside the gate as well as back streets full of workshops and places that will fire individual potters work.  We visit a workshop that has just emptied a kiln and are about to load it up again with a wide range of items including Alexandria’s large vases.

The potters mark the outside of their studios to identify it as theirs with collections of old china & murals.

We see potters making all sorts of items in workshops which is just fascinating.

The china is transported to and from the kilns on rickety looking wooden carts.  Not sure that I’d trust my objects of art to be delivered this way!

We then visit the Mao workshop where they make Mao statues that are ship all over the world.

We meet the potter who made the china tables and stools that are used in the cafe here, who tells us she could make a set and ship it to Australia for about $3,000 AUD.

We are taken up to the studio that Leigh & Alexandria use, which is a lovely bright space that has been renovated.  We have interrupted her working day enough, so we head back to the cars via the market again.

In the car park where we leave our cars there as some enormous vases and china columns.  There is also a pile of rejects that look like they failed in firing process.

So it’s back in the cars to drive approximately 183 km partly on the highway and through tunnels to the UNESCO town of Hongcun.

Once we leave the highway we drive through some pretty villages.  There are many cars parked on the side of the road being a holiday week end.

We arrive at Hongcun with plenty of time to explore this gorgeous village, where cars are not allowed to enter.

The streets are very narrow & the walls are high of this fascinating village. Horses and scooters are allowed as that’s all that will fit through some of the narrow alleys. Hongcun is a typical Hui village with waterways, bridges and narrow alleys.

We visit Chengzhi Hall that was built in 1855 in the Qing Dynasty.  There are some nice scrolls & china figuresIt has some lovely timber carvings, one of which had been covered during the cultural revolution and when it was finally discovered some years later they noticed that 2 of the heads had been cut off  from 2 of the figures.

As the sun starts to go down the light changes the look of the buildings and it’s time to head back to our cute guest house.