Day Two and the highlight of today would be going to the Great Wall of China. But before we were to go there, our first stop was at a cloisonne factory. While the Great Wall was definitely what I was looking forward to, I knew that the factory would be a great learning experience. I had never been to a factory before, and I wasn't exactly sure what to expect.
When we arrived, we first came into a cool, refreshing building with sparkling, tiled floor. There was a large open space before it branched off into two directions (left and right). But within the expanse was a table with five vases on it. Behind the table was a man who would explain to us the process of how cloisonne is made.
Cloisonne is a type of pottery. It is an expensive type of pottery, but exquisitely beautiful. At the factory, we learned about it: It takes forty-five days to make your typical cloisonne. There are three main steps in the process:
1. Add wiring.
2. Fill wiring.
3. Put it into a kiln.
The first step is to take a piece of piece of copper pottery and glue metal wiring over it to form a design. These wires are formed by factory workers and can be anything from lines to shapes(flowers, panda bears, et cetera). After the wiring was glued to the pottery, it would be ready for the next step:
With the wires secure, workers would take colorful sand and fill in the holes that were made. The colors are typically bright and beautiful. After the pottery is coated with sand, it will go into a kiln and be baked.
The second and third steps would then be repeated until the metal wires were covered completely with sand. (It would take many layers for the sand to cloak the metal wires). This is the process which takes cloisonne so long to be made--it can take months, depending on the size of the work of art, to be completed.
The rooms we visited were dimly lit and contained anywhere from two to four workers working laboriously. The air in this part of the factory was thick; there was no air-conditioning; only electrical fans. I had heard the term sweat-shops before, and I wondered if this was what that meant.
In a corner of the wire room were finished products waiting for the next step. Some of them were huge and were strange objects--large eggs, and other things that aren't your typical pottery.
We then went to the sand room. It was there that I learned something important...
While in my stay in China, I wanted to take as many photos as possible to bring back with me. Maybe it was to prove to myself that going to China had actually happened--that it wasn't just a wonderful dream. I took over five hundred photos within my first two days of being in China. With this motive, I took many photos within the factory. Within the colored sand room, I took a photo of a worker and after the photo took, the worker looked up at me with hurt eyes. Her expression portrayed a sad annoyance and thoughts that spoke of foreigners who could never understand her hardships. I lowered my camera, but before I could speak an apology, our delegation pushed me forward. Out of respect, I am not posting the photo with her in it. After that experience, I refuse to take photos of workers.
She had seen me as a tourist who didn't know better, who couldn't know what it meant to work hard and never be able to make progress. And maybe that was true. And the truth can hurt.
After the sand room, we walked outside to the kiln. The surrounding buildings were cloaked in vines and vegetation. The buildings were well-maintained and I thought that this was odd. Back in the States, if a building was covered in vegetation, it was usually an old building. Yet, I had once seen a documentation supporting solar energy that talked about buildings being a basis for vegetation--the roof would be covered in grass and the sides would be coated in vines. Maybe these buildings were eco-friendly?
Once the pottery was ready to go into the kiln, they would be transported to a shed-like building where they would be fired up to 800* Fahrenheit. We were able to see the kiln raise up, and felt the vast heat blaze against our faces in the already hot and humid temperature. When we left the kiln room, I remember feeling a rush of cold in the eighty-degree outside.
The last part of the tour consisted of our delegation being able to put sand into a wired piece of pottery. The sand would be put between wires using an eye-dropper. There was a variety of colors and the experience of making it come to life was calm and thought-numbing.
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