Fengxi porcelain and the hand-thrown teapot
Chaozhou has been firing porcelain from the shell-mound sites of six thousand years ago down to the present day. Fengxi is the centre of it, and the hand-thrown red-clay teapot is the most strong-willed branch.
The Fengxi porcelain firing technique一、枫溪瓷烧制技艺
It entered the second national list of representative intangible cultural heritage items in 2008. Pottery in Chaozhou goes back a long way: a shell-mound site more than six thousand years old, with pottery, has been found within Fengxi, along with Tang and Song kiln remains. The Song kiln on Bijia hill is a national key cultural relic site, and large numbers of figure and animal pieces were already being made there. After the Song, Fengxi became the centre of ceramic production, and has remained so.
The techniques include carving, modelling, openwork, pinching, appliqué, incising, scoring, stamping and pressing. The decorative methods are as many; figure and animal pieces use realism, exaggeration and distortion, and come out brilliant. Among them, the ‘openwork flowers’ technique — openwork patterns first cut through the body, flowers then pinched from porcelain clay and set in, the whole fired together — is a line of its own.
The hand-thrown red-clay teapot二、手拉朱泥壶
In 2014 the pottery firing technique — the Fengxi hand-thrown red-clay teapot — entered the fourth national list of representative intangible cultural heritage items.
The clay is red mud from local pits; after processing it is thrown on a revolving wheel and formed by hand. Making one takes close to sixty processes: throwing, trimming, paddling, watering, slipping, firing. The finished pot has a fine shape, spare lines, a rich colour and a high polish; it is an object of craft and a working teapot at once.
By the middle of the Qing the Fengxi red-clay pot already had a character of its own and was in wide use, and the technique has been handed down since. Xie Hua, of the fifth batch of national representative inheritors, was born in 1965 in Chaozhou and began learning from his grandfather at twelve, later following his father Xie Benji; his Bow-Gate Lifting-Handle Pot and Soul-Keeping Pot have taken national gold awards.
The painted porcelain line三、彩瓷一支
Also listed in the fourth national list in 2014 was the Chaozhou painted porcelain firing technique. It was created by Chaozhou craftsmen at the end of the Qing, using new pigments together with traditional overglaze painting and the methods of Chinese painting; its character is a full composition, bright colour and clearly separated layers. In 1910 painted Chaozhou porcelain was shown at the Nanyang Industrial Exposition in Nanjing and at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco; in the 1980s Chaozhou painted porcelain was exported to more than seventy countries and regions.
Three lines to keep apart四、三条线要分清
The Fengxi porcelain firing technique, the hand-thrown red-clay teapot technique and the Chaozhou painted porcelain technique are three separate national items, not three ways of describing one thing: the first is about porcelain sculpture and vessel forms, the second about forming the pot, the third about painted decoration. Running them together is the commonest mistake made when Chaozhou ceramics are introduced.
Related关联
For a kindred decorative craft, see Chaozhou porcelain mosaic — mosaic is made of porcelain shards.
Sources来源
The Chaozhou municipal government portal, ‘Chaozhou’s fifteen national intangible heritage items’; China Youth Net, ‘How much do you know about Chaozhou’s intangible heritage’; the inheritor page for Xie Hua, no. 05-2788, at the China intangible cultural heritage website.
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Last revised: 5 November 2026