The group headed over to Sanbao village to explore the historic and still used method of making porcelain. We visited the mine featured in the film Never Sorry and also one the sources for the porcelain for Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds project. After a long and bumpy drive we arrived at the mine.
Below is the mine cart. They actually mine into the mountain upwards. The blast a little then push the rock around and it falls right into the cart -pretty smart in my opinion. When they exhaust the porcelain above they will start digging below, which is a bit more difficult. Apparently the guy who works at this mine is super nice, but he wasn't around the day we visited.
The porcelain is wheeled out and dumped in this massive pile.
It's then taken to a water hammer and pounded into a fine dust.
The water hammer had some really interesting details. First it's powered by water, some are now powered by gas or electricity, but this one is traditional. Second, in the second image it is clearer to see that there are bamboo shoots directing water onto the axel to lubricated it. The wheel turns spinning an axel with small fingers that push down the back of the hammer, the hammer then drops and pounds the porcelain rock with it's own weight. These hammers shake the ground.
You can see it in action, click here.
The dust is washed, put through a series of settling pools, then scooped out, dried, and formed into these bricks for sale. You may wonder why they use this process in a day of technology and desire for efficiency but the chinese prefer this method to keep consistent clay for antique replicas, but also keeping the clay up to it's historic quality (good or bad.)
This is us walking around on the dusty roads...
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