Near Tongchuan, Shaanxi: 34° 59' 27" N, 109° 00' 57" E
“What color is this?” I ask Madame Zhou Zhenxi.
Zhuo is among China’s leading ceramics experts. I hold in my palm a jagged pottery shard. It is a bowl fragment old as Chartres Cathedral. Its surface, glazed more than eight centuries ago, still shines a soft, earthy, melon green. But turn it slightly under the light, and its color deepens to olive. Turn it again: It looks watery blue.
“It is called celadon,” Zhuo says. She shoots me a pitying look. “We call it sky-after-rain color.”
“So, a kind of blue?”
“Not blue!”
Iron oxides in the glazes give celadon, or green ware, its distinctive hues.
Paul Salopek
Zhuo is 80. Her stern but handsome face is wind-polished as the Loess Plateau outside her office window—a gullied, yellow dryland where once sprawled, beneath the concrete-sealed banks of the Qishui River, one of the most advanced porcelain industries in the ancient world, the Yaozhou kilns. Hundreds of firing ovens from the Tang and Northern Song dynasties pit the site. Throngs of master ceramicists had baked clay here, close by the frontier of Inner Mongolia, more than a millennium ago.
“The color is not blue,” Zhuo declares of the shard. “Nor is it green. It is like the green of a tree, but also like the blue of the sky behind the tree.”
“Blue-green?”
“Maybe,” Zhuo sighs, giving up. “There is no exact word in English.”
“When we first came there was no lodging here. The archaeologists slept in a corner of light-bulb factory.” Zhuo Zhenxi has spent more than 50 years digging through an ancient porcelain making site in Shaanxi Province.
Paul Salopek
Zhuo is a beloved mentor to many women archaeologists in China. She spent 50 years excavating the Yaozhou kilns. She arrived here at age 30, a rosy-cheeked student who, like other Mao-suited scholars assigned to study the pottery-strewn ruins, slept in the corner of a nearby lightbulb factory. It was the Cultural Revolution. A laborer-scholar, she was obliged to leave her two children back in Xi’an, the provincial capital, while working part-time in the factory and part-time as an archaeologist. “We ate what was available,” Zhuo recalls. “There wasn’t much. Sweet potatoes, mostly. These were hard times for China.”
Zhuo takes me on a tour of her life’s work: the open-air museum. The scene is astonishing.
Pottery workshops pancake atop each other in layers, all honeycombed into the sloped riverbank: a stratigraphy of humankind’s obsession with clay. Chinese artisans had stoked their ovens to a blazing 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit (1,200 degrees Centigrade) to produce the fine, waterproof stoneware the rest of the world calls porcelain. The site’s cups and vessels feature floral patterns carved with a bamboo stylus. (Designs that were later mass-produced with molds.) Generation after generation, the surrounding forests went up in smoke, then the potters resorted to coal. The shimmering blue-green glazes were concocted with iron.
“When we first came there was no lodging here. The archaeologists slept in a corner of light-bulb factory.” Zhuo Zhenxi has spent more than 50 years digging through an ancient porcelain making site in Shaanxi Province.
Paul Salopek
Zhuo is a beloved mentor to many women archaeologists in China. She spent 50 years excavating the Yaozhou kilns. She arrived here at age 30, a rosy-cheeked student who, like other Mao-suited scholars assigned to study the pottery-strewn ruins, slept in the corner of a nearby lightbulb factory. It was the Cultural Revolution. A laborer-scholar, she was obliged to leave her two children back in Xi’an, the provincial capital, while working part-time in the factory and part-time as an archaeologist. “We ate what was available,” Zhuo recalls. “There wasn’t much. Sweet potatoes, mostly. These were hard times for China.”
Zhuo takes me on a tour of her life’s work: the open-air museum. The scene is astonishing.
Pottery workshops pancake atop each other in layers, all honeycombed into the sloped riverbank: a stratigraphy of humankind’s obsession with clay. Chinese artisans had stoked their ovens to a blazing 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit (1,200 degrees Centigrade) to produce the fine, waterproof stoneware the rest of the world calls porcelain. The site’s cups and vessels feature floral patterns carved with a bamboo stylus. (Designs that were later mass-produced with molds.) Generation after generation, the surrounding forests went up in smoke, then the potters resorted to coal. The shimmering blue-green glazes were concocted with iron.
A small ceramic factory nearby carries on the traditions of the ancestors.
Out of Eden Walk
“The quality of wares varied,” Zhuo explains. “Just like products today.”
Yaozhou’s vast output catered largely to domestic Chinese markets. Clients ranged from imperial palaces to medieval restaurants. But the famous green ware, traded on the Silk Roads, also turns up in archaeological sites as far-flung as Spain and Iraq. Exquisite samples grace today’s collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York.
“Workshops had sometimes caved in,” says Zhuo, grinning. “They were locked in time. We’ve found workers’ tea kettles on tables.” Her team unearthed several intact wooden pottery wheels dating back 1,400 years. They are gone—turned to dust within minutes of being exposed.
An exquisite celadon bowl with floral impressions dating from the13th or 14th century.
Paul Salopek
“Ceramics may last a very long time,” Zhuo reminds me, “but nothing else does.”
The doyen of Yaozhou porcelain says this without the least self-pity, as museum attendants race—clucking in alarm—to gently pull her from an exhibition railing that she has climbed, with admirable moxie, to right a sign.
