Rongchang pottery: a product on a list, and the process behind it

Rongchang District lists what it produces in quantity: folding fans, hemp, pigs, pottery and tea, and it names the Rongchang pig as one of China's fine local breeds. Four lines carry the farming economy — pigs, sericulture, hemp and tea — and the district is described as the home of the white pig and the country's largest producer of exported piglets. Pottery sits in the first list rather than the second, which is a useful distinction: it is recorded as a product of the place, alongside fans and tea, and not as one of the four agricultural pillars the district builds on.

The district record names no workshop and no kiln date, so what can honestly be set beside Rongchang's name is the ceramic process itself, which Chinese sources set out step by step. Kaolinite and porcelain stone are washed, sieved and kneaded into a workable body. The body is moulded, left to half-dry, then trimmed on the wheel with a knife, and patterns are cut into the surface with tools of iron, bone or wood. Round-mouthed vessels are dipped in glaze and larger or irregular ones blown with it. Glazed and fired plain, a pot can take colour afterwards and be fired again at about 700 to 900 degrees; fired hard, the body becomes porcelain at 1,200 to 1,400.

Chinese records note that the character for porcelain and the character for magnet have been used interchangeably since the Song, and that towns in Beijing, Chongqing and elsewhere took the name Cipikou, magnet-mouth, because of the ceramics made there. That is the wider frame for a pottery town on the western edge of Chongqing. The record also fixes the ground: Rongchang lies east of Dazu and Yongchuan, south of the Sichuan county of Anyue, and its area was measured at 899.28 square kilometres in 1941. Anfu, one of its six subdistricts, is the name this pottery is carried under.