When they needed bricks to build a school they made their own kiln
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AT the end of 1944, the Bailie Technical School moved west from Fengxian County’s Shuangshipu in Baoji, a city in Shaanxi Province, to Zhangye’s Shandan County in Gansu Province. Students were organized to construct the school buildings.
In order to solve the problem of a lack of bricks, Rewi Alley and other school managers decided to build their own kiln, inviting rural experts to help. When the first brick was fired, both teachers and students were inspired and their passion ignited. The adobe they made was used for the walls, while the green bricks produced in the kiln paved the floor. Some workshops were built on stone foundations and paved with green bricks that were two feet thick.
Several relatively senior students, one of whom was Fan Wenhai, were in charge of the kiln. Fan was about 20 years old at the time.
The quality of bricks they produced was no less than those fired in the local bowl kiln. The green bricks we found at the Bailie Technical School farm were fired in the school kiln around 1947. More than 70 years later, their texture is still very hard, not rotted into dust. History has assessed its quality.
Shandan pottery has a long history. When teachers and students at the school were digging canals, a large number of painted pottery and sand pottery from the “Siba culture” period were unearthed. They date back around 3,900 to 4,000 years. It is said that the firing of porcelain began in the Hongwu period of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), and in Wanyaogou, southwest of Shandan, hence the name.
With the help of the abundant clay resources near Wanyaogou, a ceramic group was organized, and a ceramic product room built, which solved the problem of school bowls, kitchen utensils and large jars for pickled winter vegetables.
In order to improve the quality of ceramic products, Alley invited technicians from Jiangxi Province to lead the students in experiments and finally made coarse white porcelain products which were much more advanced than the black ones. While Alley was still not satisfied, he encouraged technicians to further improve the ceramic craft.
In 1948 alone, the school ceramics group produced 3,500 teapots, 6,000 tea bowls and 4,000 rice bowls. It is reported that at that time, there were more than 600 teachers and students at the school, divided into 26 production practice groups. The ceramics group was just one of them.
Later, Alley invited Japanese ceramic expert Noguchi to build a ceramics factory, producing better fine porcelain products, fire-resistant tiles, insulating porcelain splints and insulating porcelain bottles. In addition to being used by schools, they were also sold in the Hexi Corridor, known as the northwest granary, in the northwest of Gansu Province.
At the end of 1953, the school moved to Lanzhou, the provincial capital. At that time, the production practice groups, farms, pastures and coal mines were transferred to the local government or relevant ministries and commissions. The ceramics group was handed over to Shandan County, which laid the foundation for Shandan to establish a ceramics factory.
(The author is a researcher at the Shandan Alley Memorial Hall. The story is translated by Holin Wang)
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