The Nanfeng Dragon Kiln of Foshsan

 

The city of Foshan in Guangzhou province, China is possibly not one that you have ever heard of. I'd certainly never heard of it until my sister Cathrine asked if there were any old pottery kilns that we could see working during our trip to China.

So I googled it and it turned out there was one on Foshan, which wasn't too far from Hong Kong, one of our stops. And Foshan is a doozie, and the kiln even more so. Some details:

The Nanfeng Ancient Kiln is a wood-fired 'Dragon Kiln'. It is called this because it snakes for over 100 feet up a slope and looks vaguely like a dragon's back with its timber and tile roof. But the most amazing thing about it is that it has been firing pottery continuously for over 500 years!  .That's a picture of the kiln at the top of the post.

It was built in the early 1500s and is a sophisticated piece of technology because the shape allows very high temperatures of over 1300 degrees centigrade to be achieved. 

In the museum there was a diorama of old Foshan which used to have more than a hundred of these kilns, each of which could fire up to 40,000 pieces of pottery at one go. So the exports from here were stupendous, and its reputation was very high.

Which meant I was not completely surprised to find out more about Foshan. It is huge, with a population of over 9 million, and it is the biggest tile-manufacturing city in China and therefore in the world. Buyers come from worldwide to buy all kinds of tiles and ceramics and they have a huge trade fair here every two years. 

But in a place with this much clay-related history, I'm sure everyone is related to someone in the trade. And some of the families will go back as far as the Nanfeng kiln.

So far so good, but the kicker was yet to come. Cathrine knew the kiln was fired once a month, and it turned out that today was the day, so we came back in the afternoon and watched the stoker add some more logs to the furnace as the dragon of Nanfeng breathed fire again. What joy! I have tried to link a video here of the kiln-master loading more wood. It may work: