The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

by Huan Hsu

  DURING THE WEEKEND student art market, I caught up with Caroline Cheng, the founder of the Pottery Workshop, painting vases in her studio. Despite being Chinese, growing up in Hong Kong, and having trained in ceramics, Caroline had never heard of Jingdezhen, or even been to China, until 1998, when a Canadian artist gave a lecture on Chinese ceramics at her Hong Kong ceramics studio. She went to China that same year, touring Yixing, Jingdezhen, Xi’an, Shanghai, and Beijing. “My god, I was blown away,” she said. “Ceramic art in China was like from Mars. It was nothing like the Western work I’d ever seen.”

  For however cha, or substandard, present-day Jingdezhen is, it was even more filthy and run down back then. Only the central arteries were paved, and none of them had streetlights. The entire city worked and lived on the sun’s schedule, and nights were nearly pitch black. The only flight into the city departed from a military airport in Beijing. People’s Square was a garbage-strewn soccer field where farmers peddled shards, and every day at four p.m. the coal-fired kilns started belching black smoke. The JCI was in a state of disrepair. But Caroline saw, tucked away in the failed factories and old neighborhoods, expert craftsmen, unique materials, singular products, and peerless workmanship, all with no thought whatsoever given to design, and came to the same conclusion as I had during my first visit. “It was very dirty, very ugly, and very interesting,” she said. “I fell in love with it.”

  She grew determined to save the city. When she met Takeshi Yasuda, who would become the Pottery Workshop’s general manager, in 2004, she laid out her vision. “I love Jingdezhen, you love Jingdezhen,” she told him. “And we want the whole world to know about it, to let people come work with local artisans and craftsmen, have a cultural exchange, and help young artists.”

  Takeshi told her that they would need three things to get foreign artists to travel to Jingdezhen: a clean bathroom, a good cup of coffee, and wireless Internet. While Caroline toured prospective sites in Jingdezhen for the Pottery Workshop, she immediately saw the potential of the former national sculpture factory, one of the Ten Great Factories. Established in 1956 as the national center for sculpture, the Sculpture Factory produced religious figurines and animals for both domestic and export markets until the Cultural Revolution, when it was ordered to destroy all the figurines, including their molds and designs. The factory survived by making politically neutral animals and ceramic molds for industrial gloves; one small workshop in the Sculpture Factory continued to make the glove molds, and the stacks of old molds that looked like severed white arms were popular souvenirs for foreign visitors.

  During the Cultural Revolution the factory also produced many, many sculptures of Mao, another tradition that continued in the current workshops. One afternoon I followed a beaten path through tall weeds to a courtyard flanked by dilapidated wooden sheds. I peeked into one of them and saw three rows of waist-high sculptures of Mao standing with his right hand in the air and “Long Live Chairman Mao” on the base. The man smoothing out the bases introduced himself as Luo Sifu (sifu meaning “master” and used to address drivers, craftsmen, and other vocational workers). “These were ordered by a French artist,” he said. “He comes here every year. This time he ordered one hundred.”

  “Do you make Dengs?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I did once, but you can’t sell them,” he said. “Deng made a lot of changes that my grandparents’ generation wasn’t used to, so they’re not as warm to him. They don’t buy him here, much less abroad. But everyone recognizes Mao.”

  “You must be doing pretty well, making such a big order for a foreigner,” I said.

  “We don’t make shit,” he said, keeping his eyes on his work. “It’s the interpreter who makes all the money. They give a high price to the artist, and we make what we make.”

  Luo Sifu had started in the Sculpture Factory in 1980 as an eighteen-year-old apprentice to his parents. He took over the workshop after three years when his parents died or, as he put it, “went to play mah-jongg with Mao.” “When my father was making these, it was very serious,” he said. “You had to be careful where you put them, definitely not on the floor. And if you fired one wrong, you couldn’t smash it. You had to get rid of it very carefully—otherwise people would take it as a political statement.”

  The exact date of the Ten Great Factories’ demise varied. Lifelong Jingdezhen residents stated years from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. I often wondered why I got such different answers for such a cataclysmic event that happened within my lifetime. It used to be that objects weren’t considered old unless they were a thousand years old. But the speed of China’s growth, hurtling exponentially faster away from its history, seemed to compress time, and now twenty years seemed aeons ago.

  Whenever it collapsed, the Sculpture Factory employees retreated to small workspaces in the factory. Because of the unique nature of its work, the Sculpture Factory had resisted many mass-production techniques, leaving a dormant ecosystem of glazers, throwers, kilns, and other specialists all within a stone’s throw of one another, just waiting for a keystone species to support. The arrival of the Pottery Workshop completely revitalized the Sculpture Factory. Mold makers and glaze mixers moved in. A tool shop opened. Artists from across China migrated to the Sculpture Factory just to be near the Pottery Workshop—studio space was scarce and fiercely contested. The porters who were once on the verge of extinction could now make four thousand RMB a month, more than a taxi driver.

  This was how Caroline envisioned saving Jingdezhen, by reconnecting it with artistry and helping it make the right product for its time. But for all the contributions the Pottery Workshop has made in reinvigorating the porcelain ecology, old habits die hard. The local craftsmen, skilled as they were, remain extremely entrenched in their practices, and many of the foreign artists visiting Jingdezhen who completed residencies in Japan and Korea regard the habits in Chinese workshops with a mixture of amazement, disapproval, and annoyance. In Japan, artists are stereotypically obsessive in everything they do, setting out a white towel on which they line up their shiny tools and throwing away work that doesn’t meet stringent standards. When artists aren’t working, they are cleaning. In Jingdezhen, the workshop floors are littered with debris, the craftsmen are fast and messy, makeshift tools are the norm, quality is hit or miss, and there is little urgency to meet deadlines. A Peruvian artist told me she turned the entire city upside down looking for a measuring cup and came up empty. And in all her years of hosting lectures by visiting artists, Caroline couldn’t recall a single local student asking why someone made something. “All they’re interested in is how they can make the same thing,” she said.

  I WENT TO FIND Fu Sifu, a local potter I had met on my first trip to Jingdezhen who’d told me he would take me shard hunting. His studio was in the Lao Chang, or Old Factory, which, despite its name, was neither old nor a factory. A few minutes’ walk from the back gate of the Sculpture Factory, the Lao Chang was a collection of residences and workshops built in the 1990s during the rise of privatization and the decline of the national factories. The itinerant population of independent craftsmen renting the workshops churned out everything from small jars and vases to huge hand-rolled tiles, all seeking to make enough money that their progeny wouldn’t have to do the same.

  I walked up the Lao Chang’s main road, lined with oozing heaps of trash so putrid I felt I might get sick just looking at them. Wild mutts with elongated bodies and folded, triangular ears rooted through the trash. I narrowly missed stepping into a maggoty pile of chicken feathers and entrails, having smelled it milliseconds before I set my foot down. Not far from the garbage piles, freshly thrown and molded clay bodies congregated along the defunct train tracks cutting through the Lao Chang, drying in the sunlight and giving perch to butterflies and dragonflies. A Chinese art professor who had done his MFA in Illinois told me that this contrast between ugliness and beauty was what made the Lao Chang his favorite place in Jingdezhen, as well as the most representative
of modern China.

  At Fu Sifu’s studio, I found only his parked scooter. After a while Fu Sifu showed up, wearing short athletic shorts and a tank top, displaying the characteristic build of someone who wrestled with clay for a living: muscular arms and shoulders, thin waist, and strong quadriceps, which were used to brace the elbows when sitting at the throwing wheel. He rolled up the overhead door and showed me his studio. On a small platform sat a motorized throwing wheel. In the other corner was a stool and glaze gun. Most of the shelves were taken up by his cups. Packs of clay were stacked on the floor. Fu Sifu was the rare potter in Jingdezhen who handled the entire process himself, until the piece was ready for the kiln.

  “It’s very nice,” he said. “When I feel like making something, I make something. When I don’t, I do something else.” He hopped onto the platform and sat at the wheel. I watched him pull a few bowls, leaning into it with his head slightly cocked and nodding, as if listening to a beat only he could hear. He seemed to navigate the clay by feel rather than by looking at it. After every bowl he looked up, the trance broken, and smiled. “It’s really not that difficult,” he said.

  I jumped onto the back of Fu Sifu’s scooter, and we drove to a neighborhood in Jingdezhen’s old center, across the street from the Walmart, the Shiba Qiao (Eighteen Bridges, for the ancient network of waterways and crossings that no longer exists). There is an old saying that Jingdezhen consists of ninety-nine neighborhoods, though Fu Sifu said few people know about them anymore, or can locate them, so much has been cut down for new construction. Within these old neighborhoods, the craftsmen are fiercely protective of their trade secrets, passing down their knowledge only to direct descendants. This secrecy, Fu Sifu said, explains why China is so slow to change or innovate. “No one will say, ‘Hey, you do this well, and I do that well, so let’s work together,’ ” he said. “They all work alone thinking theirs is better than everyone else’s. That’s why you have so many small shops doing the exact same thing.”

  We carried rice sacks and walked through the marketplace and into the old houses, through the thirty-foot-long remnant of what had once been a long lane with houses on each side, and out to a pair of small dirt piles next to a new foundation. Trash and pottery shards piled against the houses that remained. A man urinated in the other corner. “Look at this,” Fu Sifu said of a half-destroyed, double-layered wall insulated with pieces of brick. “Many generations of people lived here. All gone now.” He rooted through the dirt and collected a few pieces of pottery. “You can clean these off, and they’ll look really nice,” he said. “There won’t be any more in the future.”

  While I scanned the earth for shards, Fu Sifu continued to admire the wall. He pointed to the bricks, dark and glossy with the iridescent isobars of an oil slick. Over Jingdezhen’s thousand years of history, wood-burning kilns had fired nearly all its wares. And when these kilns were fired, their entrances were blocked up with a wall of bricks. Those bricks became glazed when the flying ash stuck to and melted on their faces. After a few uses, the vitrified bricks were discarded and scavenged as building materials. Once I began to notice them, the entire old city appeared to have been constructed from these bricks, glinting like obsidian.

  “You don’t have to dig for shards,” Fu Sifu said. “Just pick off the surface. You can find plenty of things that way.”

  “What do you look for?”

  “Pieces with flowers, designs, those are worth it,” he said. “Value depends on the person. If you feel like it, pick it up. Wah! Look at this.” He extracted the base of a fencai overglaze painted bowl with a Kangxi reign mark. “This is really rare. This is worth money.”

  As recently as fifteen years ago, these shards were as useless as they were plentiful. Everyone knew that the city government’s offices sat atop an old imperial kiln, but no one had much interest in its artifacts. But as the Chinese economy gained strength, and its people grew more confident and nationalistic, native traditions became valuable again. Suddenly antique porcelain could fetch millions, and so even shards found a market. When the city government vacated its old offices, residents flooded the site with picks and shovels, overwhelming the city’s ad hoc preservation efforts. Locals even set up small stores near the site just so they could sneak over or dig tunnels under the hastily erected wall at night. Eventually the city razed all the buildings around the site and turned it into a museum.

  Fu Sifu dropped the Kangxi shard into his bag, and we moved through more construction, scrambling up a large pile of excavated dirt that had sat long enough to have formed a hard crust. Fu Sifu had grown up around here, and despite the sound of hammers and power saws filling the air, just enough of the old neighborhood remained for him to orient himself. “There used to be all these little streets here, but they’re gone now,” he said. “It was all connected, all the way to that chimney.” He pointed to a turret far off on the horizon. We peered into the pit that the hill we were standing on had come from; the walls were layer upon layer of collapsed kilns and shard beds. The rounded forms of broken teacups looked like clutches of fossilized dinosaur eggs. “Those shards two meters down, they’re about a hundred years old,” he said. That was only halfway to the bottom. “And there’s even more under there.”

  We walked to the street where Fu Sifu had lived until he was eight years old, formerly anchored by a lively market that Fu would buy rice from for his family. His parents and grandparents had worked in a porcelain factory making dinnerware. “It was better than being farmers,” he said. “They had work, they had food—what else do you need?” He considered it fortunate that his mother had taken an early retirement from the factory and received a full pension that helped to support the family when the factories died. After he finished school, he sought out a master to teach him how to throw, and he had been working in ceramics since 1998.

  Now Fu Sifu’s old street was completely flattened, except for three sagging wooden houses. Some of the old signs indicating the names of the neighborhoods still hung at the heads of the remaining alleys, all but drowned out by electrical wiring and modern signage. A brick wall bore the faded remnants of a political banner: Executing the one-child policy is the responsibility of young people! We walked out to a street corner with two- and three-story tiled buildings. “This was one of the first areas they developed,” Fu said. “When they built those buildings, there were tons of shards. They’re under here, too, but you’ll have to wait until they rebuild this street to find them.”

  As we circled back to his scooter, Fu pointed out the woodcarvings that still adorned many of the old doorways. The modern architecture was so visually noisy, it made seeing the historical buildings and houses difficult. But if I concentrated on shapes or textures—a curved eave, weathered wood, the telltale glint of kiln brick—they still revealed themselves. “What happens to these old places?” I asked. “Do people preserve them?”

  Fu threw up his hands. “If you were that poor, living in those circumstances, would you be interested in preservation?” he said. “You can’t even fill your belly. How can you worry about preservation?”

  When Fu Sifu dropped me off after lunch, we argued over the bag of shards. I wanted to divide them. He insisted that I keep everything. I relented, but when I dumped out the sack’s contents in my room, I didn’t see the fencai Kangxi piece that we had picked up, leaving me with an assortment of Republican-era fragments that I, despite being new to the game, had already dismissed as not old enough for my taste. I pawed through the shards again and again, but it didn’t appear. I wondered if Fu Sifu had kept it and hoped that he had.

  THE ONE THING about my apartment that I couldn’t deal with was the cockroaches, which infested the kitchen and bathroom; I often had to scatter them out of the tub before bathing. I called Ms. Zhang to say that the situation was untenable. Maggie taught me the Chinese word for “cockroach,” which was easy to remember since it was a homonym for “filth wolf.”

  Ms. Zhang came over to the apartment, complaining
that she had never had a tenant as luosuo as me. I reminded her that I had accepted a litany of the apartment’s shortcomings. “But there are tons of cockroaches,” I said. “I see them every—”

  “Cockroaches?” she repeated, laughing. “That’s not a problem. They’re completely normal here. We treat them like our children.”

  Maybe so, I said, but I was moving out. I had paid three months’ rent and stayed less than two weeks, so I offered to let her keep the entire first month but wanted the last two back. Ms. Zhang refused, saying that it was my problem, not hers. I argued with her about it, because I figured if I couldn’t get a fair deal from some luosuo landlady in Jingdezhen, what hope did I have trying to convince officials to let me dig for my family’s porcelain? I eventually got her to concede the last month and checked into a hotel, where I took one of the most satisfying showers of my life. A few days later I was introduced to an Australian artist who offered to let me stay in her apartment after she returned to Melbourne. She had managed to buy a two-floor unit in a new development not far from the Sculpture Factory and renovated it with Western bathrooms and even a full oven.

  After I moved to my new lodgings, Lewis phoned to say he couldn’t help me look for my great-great-grandfather’s old house. “Why not?” I said.

  “I talked to Grandma, and she made me promise not to,” he said. “For political reasons.”

  “Political?” I said. “How?”

  “Because she’s afraid if I take you to their graves, people will see a rich American there and go dig up their graves.”

  So that was the “dangerous” reason why my grandmother had forbidden me from going to Xingang. “That doesn’t sound political to me,” I said.

  “Everything in China is political.”

  I STARTED LOOKING for someone to help me research San Yi Po’s father, the supposed former county commissioner, in the local archives and was introduced to Ding Shaohua, a twenty-five-year-old student at the JCI who had worked for a stint at the Pottery Workshop. I met him at a Korean restaurant in the jumble of shops across from the JCI, where he had already ordered a large bottle of beer, two glasses, and a bag of shelled peanuts. I liked him immediately. He wore a white dress shirt and had spiked his short hair up. He was guileless and curious and thoughtful, and while he spoke good English, it restricted his natural garrulousness, so we switched to Chinese, in which, thanks to the immersion in Jingdezhen, I had become fairly proficient.