FROM SANFORD TO YIXING Final installment - from Frank Proctors travel diary The mayor had scheduled morning visits for us to two of Yixing’s most important sights – the “Bamboo Sea” and the Yixing Pottery Museum. We drove about 15 miles out from the city, along roads lined with wildflowers, climbing up into the hills to a large bamboo forest park, the “Bamboo Sea.” Here, spread over 28,000 acres, the hills were thick with green shafts of bamboo reaching up toward the sky. We took an electric cart from the park entrance to the base of the hills, then got out and began to climb. Although we only walked for about half an hour up to a viewing pagoda, the pathway was steep so it was a strenuous climb. Still, the walk through the forest was cool, green, and calming. In addition to being a national symbol of China, bamboo is highly functional in the Chinese economy – the hard yet light fibrous bamboo is used for much of the scaffolding for China’s construction boom. But here in the Bamboo Sea, the emphasis was on the scenic beauty of bamboo. Appropriately, Sam Gaskins and Bob Joyce were wearing bright green shirts to blend into the bamboo – fortunately, we didn’t lose them in the forest. As we rode back toward town, Kirk Bradley asked Jennifer He about the apartments we had been seeing. She said that buying a private apartment in Yixing would cost the equivalent of about US$1,000 per square meter. She estimated the average apartment size at around 100 square meters. Sam and Huang Ling traded stories about her time in Sanford, as head of the Confucius Classroom at CCCC from 2011 to 2013. She talked about Lee County’s friendly people, beautiful countryside and warm sense of community. You could see her genuine enthusiasm. Ling told him that her son had a wonderful experience at East Lee Middle School, and now hopes to go to Georgia Tech. Next, we stopped at Yixing’s extensive pottery museum. We had been hearing frequently that Yixing is very proud of its pottery heritage, which is one reason they view Sanford as an excellent Sister City. We arrived at the museum and met our English-speaking museum guide. J.D. Williams, ever the Sanford goodwill ambassador, immediately handed her a Sanford pen and lapel pin. As she walked us through the museum, we felt we were walking through Chinese history. There was Yixing pottery from almost every dynasty, with some dating back even before the recorded dynasties. The earliest shards of pottery from the Yixing area were made in the Neolithic period some 7,000 years ago, and the oldest complete pieces were from the Warring States period of Chinese history (475 BC to 221 BC). The popularization of glazing techniques came during the Tang Dynasty; we saw one technique developed by Yixing potters to beautifully glaze only the top half of large pieces, so they could put more into the kiln without having the pottery stick together. The largest piece in the museum was a huge Yixing ceramic vat (which would be filled with water and placed near large buildings for putting out fires) from the more recent Ming Dynasty. It was big enough for a small person to fit inside. We knew that the Zi Sha (purple sand) clay was a unique feature of Yixing as a pottery-making center, and the museum displayed actual samples of the clay, which did indeed look purple. We learned that some Yixing clay has a blue, yellow, or green tint – there are five colors in all. Potters use firing techniques to help control the color: the hotter the firing, the darker the color. The stories and legends about Yixing’s pottery history added a deeper level of interest to the museum. There was a pottery artwork entitled “The Weird Monk Who Discovered Zi Sha Clay,” a sculpture of a simple monk carrying beads of multi-colored clay. This represents a Yixing legend that a wandering Buddhist monk had first come across veins of clay with strange colors. He eagerly returned to the nearby town to report what he had discovered, saying it would make the town rich. Unfortunately, no one believed him. They shunned the monk, thinking he was crazy, and never imagined that the unique clay would indeed bring fame to Yixing one day. We also learned the story of the Ming Dynasty potter Gong Chun, who is known as “the first person ever to make a teapot.” Teapots had been made before the Ming Dynasty of course, but legend has it that Gong Chun was the first individual potter who was bold enough to sign his work. The story goes that Gong Chun stole the latest technique for making teapots from a monastery. He began making beautiful pottery teapots according to the technique and, in an unheard of step, brazenly carved his name into the teapot handles. The practice caught on, and by the Qing Dynasty, pottery craftsmen had become bolder still, carving their names on the lids of their teapots. A newer Zi Sha tea set in the museum represented a more modern story. A famous pottery artisan and professor had spent the twenty years, from 1956 to 1976, crafting, shaping and refining a single tea set – a teapot and six tea cups – in an attempt to create the “perfect” tea set. Apparently, he succeeded: according to our guide, this tea set was now worth the equivalent of US$3 million. The museum impressed us all in the way it conveyed colorful stories like these about the development of Yixing pottery. Although Sanford doesn’t have 7,000 years of pottery history (or a $3 million tea set), there are many wonderful stories related to Lee County’s pottery history. Visiting Yixing’s museum helped us think about the many ways we could tell those stories. For example, Huang Ling asked about the pottery with strange faces that she had seen so often during her time in Sanford. Was there a story behind them? Bob Joyce was able to tell her something about “face jugs,” dating back more than a century. To differentiate their works from others, potters had begun to put faces on their jugs, sometimes the stranger the better. North Carolina is one of the states where face jugs may have originated, and their history ties into early African-America culture. Our Yixing hosts were fascinated to hear such pottery stories that were very different from their own. After lunch, we got into the van again, for the final time, for the three-hour trip back to Shanghai. In the van, we did a final debrief on the Yixing meetings. At lunch, we had gotten more information on Yixing’s industry. As of 2013, Yixing had more than 2,000 foreign-funded enterprises. In addition to the water treatment businesses that Mayor Zhang had mentioned during the previous day’s meeting, Yixing’s environmental industries include environmental monitoring instruments, solid waste disposal, and air pollution control. The government is also highlighting Yixing’s “new energy” industry – photovoltaic, wind energy equipment, biomass energy, and photoelectric products. Yixing has manufacturing in the power cable and wire industry. Ceramics and refractories industry includes both local companies and international firms like Osram and Asahi Glass. Bob and Chet brainstormed possible business partnerships, and also discussed strong CCCC programs like Laser and Photonics Technology and Veterinary Medical Technology that might be possible areas of cooperation. We are all looking forward to the next steps in the relationship. We arrived in the city and fought the Shanghai rush hour traffic to back to the hotel. The Sanford delegation had one more night in Shanghai before heading to the airport for the long trip back to Sanford via Detroit and Raleigh. I had to hop into a taxi to go directly to the airport for my 8:30 pm flight back to Hong Kong.
Posted on: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 13:05:46 +0000