by Huan Hsu
Ding was born in Jiangxi but grew up in a suburb of Shanghai. He had been an uninterested student in high school and enrolled in the JCI for ceramics just to please his family—despite being known for its ceramic program, the JCI was something of a safety school—figuring he’d switch to another subject once he got to campus. But as soon as he saw how small the school was, how dirty the streets were, and how tu, or “unsophisticated” (tu literally means “earth” or “dirt” and forms the root for the insult tubaozi, or “country bumpkin”) the professors were, from their clothing to their outlooks, he lost hope. And he wasn’t allowed to change his major, either. Now he was about to graduate from the JCI with a ceramic arts degree that he didn’t care about; he smashed all his work as soon as it was graded.
But during his first year at school, he met an older JCI student who was working at the Pottery Workshop as an interpreter. Once he saw the opportunities available to a skilled English speaker, he ignored his classes, avoided his classmates (“I just thought everyone there was sick, and I didn’t want to catch it and get dragged down with them”), and devoted all of his time to improving his English.
He passed China’s College English Test, a requirement for graduation and something employers increasingly look for in applicants, on his first try, despite not being able to study after eleven p.m. because that was when the JCI shut off the power for the night. Then he caught on with another outfit offering artist residencies and helped guide tours of China for visiting artists. Now he was trying to start his own travel service. He dreamed of working on a cruise ship.
Ding didn’t know much about the archives but said he’d ask around for me. And when I mentioned my interest in collecting ancient shards, he told me he knew of an area outside town where I could find piles of them.
Ding arranged for a driver to take us to the shards, and I met him one morning at the entrance of the Sculpture Factory. We were joined by a local artist, Kai E, a small, trim woman with the patina of someone who had recently made the transition to mother. A native of Hainan, the tropical island province in the South China Sea, Kai E had tried and failed to get into art school twice, after which her father told her she had to go to work. But she wanted to make art, so she came to Jingdezhen for the JCI’s accounting school, thinking she could switch to ceramic arts. The school refused to allow it, so she dropped out and started her own ceramics practice. She was a complete autodidact, never missing a Pottery Workshop lecture, reading books, and studying shards.
Ding wore a green T-shirt that read, in English, “Being gay is not a choice … Hate is.” I asked him where he got the shirt.
“The market downtown,” he said. “What’s it mean?”
I explained it.
“Ah, so it’s about equality,” he said, nodding.
Our driver, Qi Sifu, was born in San Bao, a valley in Jingdezhen’s southern hills that had supplied clay to Jingdezhen since the Song dynasty. He had deep roots in that industry, and his family still operated water hammers in San Bao, smashing porcelain stone and processing it into bricks. He used to do it himself before he bought a van and started his car service.
Beyond the dusty, angular masses of Jingdezhen’s industrial plants, we entered the countryside of rice fields and wooded foothills braided with alpine streams. Farmers coaxed water buffalo through verdant plots and graves dotted the rises. As much as I romanticized China’s old cities, they had been dirty, crowded, full of dysentery. Then as now, the Chinese yearned for the clean air, fresh water, and solitude of the countryside. There was a reason for all the ghastly new houses in rural villages.
This entire area went by the name Nanshijie and had been the location of a quarry for porcelain stone, which was processed into a one-source clay. The clay fired extremely white, but without additives to firm up its bones, it could be used to make only small objects—cups, bowls, and teapots. This clay and the surrounding pine forests had once sustained hundreds of ancient kilns. Between the Song and the Yuan dynasties, Jingdezhen’s ceramics center relocated to Hutian, near the mouth of the San Bao valley, and began producing blue and white wares for export. It was closer to the river and obviated the laborious method of transport by horse or handcart on unpaved roads, and Nanshijie declined. Now, Qi Sifu said, people in the area mostly survived by mining coal.
We passed through the village of Liujiawan, which used to be home to an eponymous kiln. “This area, about thirty thousand square meters, is probably all shards,” Qi Sifu said. “They fired from the Northern Song until about the middle of the Song dynasty, maybe a hundred years.” Those days the yield hovered around 30 percent. “These mountains are full of shards,” Qi Sifu said.
Qi Sifu honked at everything that moved: men, women, children, scooters, dogs, cats, and chickens. The ride took us longer than usual, having to slow through construction areas where a new highway was going up to connect the villages with the city. As the valley narrowed, a stream banked alongside us for a stretch before giving way to a set of narrow-gauge rails, for the coal train that ran from Jingdezhen to parts unknown. Then the valley widened, and we drove along a flat expanse of green fields that stretched to hills on the horizon. Qi Sifu veered onto a small road and then turned up a thin driveway. He parked in front of a mud hut, next to which rose a new multistory house with tiled walls and metal railings. Opposite the mud hut were undulating mounds of shards so large that it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the scale. The piles closest to the house had crevasses deep enough that people disappeared when they descended into them. Elsewhere swaths of vines, sesame blossoms, wildflowers, and small trees had taken root. Qi Sifu said plants grew well on shards because of all the ash and aerated soil.
“Oh, wah!” Kai E said, leaping out of the car. This was her first time seeing the shards, despite having lived less than an hour away for many years. “Let’s start picking!” She ran onto the piles and stooped to pick a few shards around her feet. “Wah, they even have designs on them!”
Qi Sifu, having grown up kicking shards and now ferrying visitors to see them, appeared bemused and slightly embarrassed by Kai E’s unbridled desire. “There are lots with designs!” he said. “Most have them. They aren’t worth much. Not worth picking up.”
“Wah, this is so different from the market,” Kai E said. “It’s like you’ve returned to the Song dynasty. I wish I could move these piles back home with me.”
Kai E disappeared over the hills, occasionally sending up a “Wah!”
“People come here to pick shards all the time,” Qi Sifu said to me, as if confiding with a fellow parent. “They sit with a stool and just look for pieces.”
As I climbed over the shifting piles, picking up pottery fragments that caught my eye, I was possibly the first person to handle them in a thousand years. Glinting among the earth tones of the saggers were shards of celadon in pale blues and greens and yellows, molded or incised with subtle but elaborate floral patterns, billowing like the clouds their colors recalled. The saggers had broken away like eggshells, by nature and by hand, to reveal the shiny, malformed embryos they contained. Orange and red dragonflies buzzed about, taking rests on the shards. Tiny frogs splashed in the rainwater that had collected in upturned saggers. The ground, moist with dew, felt spongy. The only sounds were the clink of pottery, birds chirping, and distant roosters crowing. Then came a series of explosions from the highway construction. “China is developing right now,” Ding said, laughing. “Too fast.” Beyond the piles I could see a row of concrete monoliths, sections of the new highway awaiting installation. The government had already begun hauling away some of the shards to make room for the highway.
I walked back to the van with a handful of shards and joined Qi Sifu. He stood with his arms behind his back and weight on one leg, aviator sunglasses taking up half his face. According to him, the area used to be even bigger, dozens of acres, and the pits we were exploring had all been dug by shard hunters. “The government ought to turn this into a tourist attraction, charge an
entrance fee,” he said. “That would be nice. But they don’t care.
“My idea is to buy some land, move some of this over there, and put a replica kiln there, make it all like it was in ancient times,” he continued. “And you could open a teahouse, a restaurant, people could look at the shards, have tea, a meal. If I charged just ten RMB per person, I’d never spend it all in my life. But I don’t have the capital, and my shenfen is too small.” Shenfen means “identity” and is the same word in the Chinese term for “identity card.” It seemed that Qi Sifu’s time driving for foreign artists had laced his entrepreneurialism with Western sensibilities, but without a bigger name, or a white face, his strivings were bound to remain incremental.
On the way back to town, Qi Sifu described how he had learned the clay trade from his parents and worked the water hammers for seventeen years until he saved enough money to buy his van. “I didn’t want to do it anymore,” he said. “The pay was too low. My salary still isn’t great, but the life is better than doing clay.”
“Doing clay,” as Qi Sifu called it, is as dependent on the weather as farming, that bleakest of vocations in the Chinese mind. If the streams don’t get enough rain draining into them to run fat and fast, the water hammers—stone hammers powered by water wheels—don’t move, and clay isn’t made. According to Qi Sifu, the method for making clay in the San Bao valley has not changed since the Song dynasty. His family bought raw porcelain stone that had been mined nearby, pulverized it into powder, and washed it in several water pits. The finest, purest particles form a kind of scum on the surface, which is skimmed off into piles with the color and consistency of mantou dough and then formed into dunzi, or bricks, destined for porcelain workshops.
Every month during the rainy season, with a quartet of hammer mills going, Qi Sifu could produce about a hundred pounds per day. The year he quit, one ton of finished bricks fetched about 600 RMB, which meant that in one wet month of manual labor, he could gross a bit less than 1,000 RMB. Subtracting his material and hired labor costs, he took home about 500 RMB. During the winters the streams slow to a trickle and the work stops. Of the forty or so families that were making clay when Qi Sifu was young, a number that he said had not changed since the Song dynasty, only five or six remained.
Qi Sifu pulled over to show us the remnants of a Song dynasty bottle workshop. The highway was scheduled to run right through the site, and a clearing large enough to accommodate an eighteen-wheeler’s turning radius had been cut into the hill. From the road, there were no indications of a former kiln; the broken saggers that covered the hillsides looked like scree.
Unlike at the shard piles, it was difficult to envision the original landscape here. A football field’s worth of material had already been trucked away, yet the perimeter of the clearing was still crowded with ceramics. Qi Sifu pointed out where a dragon kiln had crawled up one hill, now a terraced trench of reddish earth. I climbed up into the kiln’s old belly and immediately found a broken spout. Only the outer layer of the dragon kiln’s bricks remained. The interior bricks, which would have been glazed, had all been scavenged. From my perch, I could see three cars with tinted windows on an outcropping on the other side of the road, parked together as if in conversation. I wondered who they were and if they were watching us.
“I remember I came here last year—it was still more complete,” Ding said. “Next year it’ll be gone.”
“They couldn’t have put the road a little this way or that?” I said.
“They don’t think like that,” Qi Sifu said. “There are too many of these old kilns. They’ve already saved Hutian, the ancient official kiln. That’s enough for them. They can’t save everything.”
The entire route back seemed to pass through Song or Five Dynasties–era kilns. Every mile or so Qi Sifu would point out another one, a few thousand square meters in size but usually unnamed and distinguished only by the wares that it produced. Even speeding by in the van, I could see the layers of shards exposed by rain and erosion.
We looped through town and then back up the San Bao valley to see Qi Sifu’s family’s hammer mill, which he now rented out. “Before I started driving, when I was working here, I hated it when people came to look,” he said. “It was such bitter work, and I didn’t like feeling like I was performing for these artists or videographers or television stations, who’d show the film and talk about how my life was so bitter. But I changed my mind. Now I wish for more people to see this, so they can see the history, see how hard they work, what goes into it. You have to have this environment to do this, and only this environment.”
One of the laborers, shirtless and with a receding hairline, was breaking down a pile of porcelain stone into smaller pieces with a mallet. Under the tiled roof of the mill, amid the arrhythmic thud of the hammers and the creak of turning wheels, his wife stood at a table made from a split tree trunk, forming clay dunzi. Balls of clay rested on the rafters like boules of bread. She scooped a lump from the pile on the table, kneaded it a few times, slapped it into a wood frame, and sliced off the excess with a wire strung on a bowed twig, which she returned to the pile. She disassembled the frame, extracted the dunzi, and added it, on its long edge, to the grid of curing bricks behind her. Then she reassembled the frame and began the process again.
There was a second pile of rocks, next to which lay a large, overturned stone base, from a column or statue, with a carved face. “What’s this?” Qi Sifu asked.
The man didn’t know. “A businessman just asked me to process them,” he said.
“Where’s it from?”
The man shrugged. “Nearby,” he said. “We’re going to make clay from it.”
Qi Sifu knelt to inspect the base. “This is an ancient stone artifact,” he said. “You’ve already picked off some of the carving.” He stood, shaking his head. “That’s too bad.”
DING DID SOME looking into the archives and reported back confused. San Yi Po claimed that her father had been Jingdezhen’s xian zhang, but Jingdezhen had always been a zhen, an administrative unit akin to a town, not a xian, or county. So the man in charge of Jingdezhen would have been a zhen zhang, not a xian zhang. Fuliang, where the Yuan had established the first government bureau, was the xian. Perhaps San Yi Po had mistakenly conflated Jingdezhen with Fuliang. I hoped a trip to Fuliang would make things clear.
Looking north as we crossed the Cidu (Porcelain Capital) Bridge, the river curved east, exposing green, unpopulated hills. To the south, squeezed between the serpentine bend of a new thoroughfare and the west bank of the river, were two of Jingdezhen’s oldest remaining streets, one dating back to the Ming and the other to the Qing, narrow lanes paved with stone slabs and lined with houses built from kiln bricks or wood. Down the center of the lane ran an aqueduct, covered with old stone tiles, smooth as river rocks and dipping in the middle, the result of hundreds of years of handcart traffic.
In my great-great-grandfather’s time, those streets led to one of the major wharves of Jingdezhen, bustling with businesspeople, customhouses, hotels, and markets. The Sanlu Temple, at the head of the lane, watched over a flotilla of merchant ships docked along the river, loading porcelain that would move downstream to Poyang Lake, the customs port of Jiujiang, and then on to the Yangtze, from which it would disperse all over China and the world. My great-great-grandfather’s collection likely passed through this very lane on its way to Xingang. Now all that remained of the old docks was a half-exposed stone ramp emerging from the water.
The ride to the Fuliang Gu Xian Ya, the ancient county government office, was shorter than I expected. Ding directed Qi Sifu past the turnoff for the tourist area and to the back of the adjacent village to avoid paying an entrance fee. We walked up a path, between houses, vegetable plots, and fruit orchards, and emerged at a 150-foot red pagoda, built during the Song dynasty atop a Tang dynasty temple. The women fanning themselves inside the pagoda told us there was nothing to see, so we walked on. Ding stopped to peer at the crumbling walls of a house bui
lt from stone and kiln bricks. “They tore down these houses after Liberation because they knew wealthy families hid gold and valuables in the walls,” he explained. “Liberation” was the mainland term for the events of 1949. “So I’m always interested in checking the holes in these walls.”
Now as then, a wall encircled the government complex at the center of Fuliang. Ding and I veered into the old cornfields outside the walls, looking for a place to enter. “There are shards everywhere!” he exclaimed. We studied the ground but couldn’t figure out where they might have come from; Fuliang had been an administrative and supervisory bureau, not a production center. “Oh, look,” Ding said. He picked up a coin with a square hole. It could have been anywhere from a hundred to a thousand years old.
There wasn’t any getting around the wall, so we returned to the main gate of the magistrate’s office, guarded by a thousand-year-old osmanthus tree and a crumbling brick wall under a metal awning that a sign indicated had once been a Song dynasty pavilion. I paid the entry fee while Ding waited at the gate. In the ceremonial hall, a woman operated a booth where visitors could have their photographs taken wearing Qing dynasty garb. I walked through every hall and room in the complex, realizing bit by bit that there was no archival material on site, yet never completely giving up on the idea.
On the way out, I paused in the ceremonial hall, where the names of all the Fuliang magistrates from the Tang dynasty through the Republican era were posted—some of the only historical information the place seemed to have. If my relative had been the xian zhang, his name would have been up on the wall. But I saw only a handful of Lius listed for the possible dates he would have served, and none of them were from Xingang or had the correct generation name.