In the Jingdezhen ceramics industry, two civilian heroes are worshipped, one is the wind and fire god Tongbin, and the other is the kaolin saint He Zhaoyi. They both have the simplest ideas, praying for the people and protecting the kiln workers. Ordinary heroes will be passed on by word of mouth among the masses and go further.
Four
Obliteration is a common word in the world, just like we are used to life and death.
The sound of the hammers in Dongbu is sparse. This lightness can float to the top of Gaoling Mountain.
The people on Gaoling Mountain have dispersed. The waves of Dongbu can't hold back the boats.
The tracks are still deeply engraved into the bluestone road, and the wheelbarrows are still creaking closer. Local specialties such as oil, grain, tea, and glaze clay gather at the dock and are transported to Jingdezhen, 45 kilometers away. The largest volume is naturally kaolin clay. Every day, hundreds of boats enter and exit Dongbu Wharf, attracting the attention of Dongbu people. The Qing Dynasty poet Ling Rumian wrote: "Heavy water pestles are opened on both sides of the river, and thunder is heard for several miles before the rain. The mud is pounded until the rice is thick, and the boats are returned before the boats arrive."
The porcelain clay floated over in white. The old man with white hair and youthful face, the innocent child, the woman holding the pipa and half covering her face, the ambitious man, can feel that his dream is also floating. The men carrying the load quickened their pace and stepped on the boats that had been waiting there for a long time. Perhaps the porters came from Gaoling Mountain, carrying the breath of their relatives, and the men, women, old and young in Dongbu swarmed forward for a silent meeting.
At its peak, there were nearly 30,000 miners gathered on Gaoling Mountain. From Gaoling Village to Dongbu, there were fireworks in thousands of homes, cars and people coming and going, and the flow was endless. Hongtan, on the bank of Donghe River, has become the shipping and concentration point of kaolin since the Southern Song Dynasty due to its superior geographical location. It has become one of the four ancient streets in Fuliang County, comparable to Xianghu Street in the south, Legong Street in the north, and Sanlong Street in the west, and was renamed "Dongbu". Most of those who transport porcelain clay in Dongbu are from Duchang and Wuyuan. They form a boat club and spontaneously build boats, repair docks and bridges. The boats are produced in two local shipyards in Dongbu. There are two types of boats: floating boats and ducktail boats. The former has a wide head and a wide belly, and the stern is tilted, like the mouth of a dustpan. The carrying capacity does not exceed 10 tons. The latter has a similar bow to the floating boat, and the back half is shaped like a ducktail. One person can drive it. It takes two days to reach Jingdezhen from Dongbu during flood season and three days during dry season. The oars are swaying, and the fishermen's songs are everywhere. From Donghe to Changjiang, boats are connected, and kaolin is quietly ushering in the moment of rebirth in the displacement. Only after a hundred refinings can the real clay be known. "Jingdezhen Pottery Records" said: "Those who make fine porcelain must look for those produced in Dongbu."
Shangjie Street. Zhongjie Street. Xiajie Street. Shops are lined up one after another, and inns, wine shops, rice shops, and medicine shops are flourishing on both sides with wheel tracks as the axis. The stilt houses are located by the river, like women dressing up, and their thoughts turn into sparkling waves. I am clearly the descendant of those miners or boatmen, and I come here to collect the codes left by our ancestors to the mountains and rivers.
After being eroded by wind and rain year after year, the shops can only keep warm with light and shadow. In the long corridor with wooden structures, several old people are chatting slowly. The history of kaolin is already a strange and distant thing. While walking, I heard such a folk song: "On the upper street, on the lower street, the street is endless; silk satin, sweet and sour oil, eight hundred and nine shops." The scene of Dongbu's flourishing flowers no longer sets out on the return journey with the silence of kaolin. Well, without the protection of kaolin, perhaps Dongbu has regained peace and sincerity.
The battle for wealth once also started at Dongbu Wharf.
During the reign of Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty, the porcelain clay operators in the county instigated local thugs to run rampant at the docks, occupy the land, prevent the ships of Wuyuan County from loading, and cause troubles, fights and disputes, which seriously interfered with the transportation market. For a time, there were complaints. Wuyuan ship owner Chen Shirong and others went to Raozhou Prefecture to file a complaint. On July 8, the 45th year of Emperor Qianlong's reign, the government announced the "Notice on the Shipment of Ceramic Clay at Dongbu Street Dock" and erected a monument on the roadside, clearly stipulating: "From Donggang Port to Dongbu, the seventy-mile ceramic clay of Dongbu, regardless of local Wu ships, is open to merchants to hire and load, and no arbitrary division of boundaries, rampant trouble, and engraved on stone to abide by it forever."
I read this stone tablet at the old site of the dock. Deep in every word, there is a treacherous story. Perhaps He Zhaoyi never thought that when the bottle of kaolin was opened, the devil also ran out.
There is also a stone tablet "Strictly Prohibit Random Mining of Clay", which was erected in the 59th year of Qianlong. The background is that the villagers tried to protect the good farmland and the grave veins and prevented Hong Guangzu and others from digging Gaoling, which led to a murder. For this reason, the Fuliang County Government Office defined the scope of mining porcelain clay, requiring that "in the future, all the subordinates should abide by the four boundaries of the agreement. Regardless of the size of the mountain field, they must be managed and stored according to the contract. It is not allowed to rent and dig clay, which will hinder the foundation of the field." It seems that whether it is Dongbu or Gaoling, whether it is digging porcelain clay or water transportation, most of the information I have read is presented in the form of group portraits. People are keen to pursue the works of ceramic masters, and rarely mention the grassroots miners who deal with mud. From clay to porcelain, it is a history of the ups and downs of the world.
Five
While the story of porcelain clay was unfolding in full swing on Gaoling Mountain and the banks of Donghe River, Jingdezhen porcelain industry, with the help of the "binary formula" body making method, continued to ferment and eventually became the leader in the porcelain industry.
Tang Ying, the Qing Dynasty's pottery supervisor, had an infatuation with porcelain. I have not verified whether he saw the magnificent scene of "green mountains floating on white snow" piled up by kaolin tailings. But I can find the shadow of Donghe River flowing into Changjiang River in his poems: "Twenty years of beard and eyebrows on the river, fishermen live in the same hometown. Ma'anshan Bili Village Rain, duck-tail boat light Changshui wind."
The first person who cast his wise eyes on Gaoling was Song Yingxing of the Ming Dynasty. In his masterpiece "The Exploitation of the Works of Nature", he recorded: "The soil comes from the two mountains of Wuyuan and Qimen. One is Gaoliang Mountain, which produces japonica soil, which is hard; the other is Kaihua Mountain, which produces glutinous soil, which is soft. The two soils are combined to make porcelain." The Gaoliang Mountain in it is Gaoling.
The "Fuliang County Chronicle" of the 21st year of Kangxi in the Qing Dynasty stated: "In the 32nd year of Wanli (1604), the town soil guard Dai Liang and others went to the inner eunuchs and claimed that kaolin soil was an official business and ordered it to be taken." At this time, Gaoling became a place where officials and civilians jointly mined. This is indeed unique and strange. For a long time, Gaoling allowed civilians to mine soil as a business, and did not directly take it back to the court in a rough and barbaric manner. Perhaps it is precisely because of the lack of official color that Gaoling is far less brilliant than the porcelain of Jingdezhen. Like most plants, it survives and dies in the wilderness, and like most people, it is as fast as the wind and is forgotten.
Gaoling did not attract the love of literati. Porcelain has become more popular than clay. I tried to dig up ancient poems about kaolin, but I got little. Generation after generation of people bent over and buried their heads in digging kaolin, their backs overlapped but were blurred.
Interestingly, a French missionary named Yin Hongxu painstakingly studied the production methods of Jingdezhen porcelain and traced the origin of kaolin. On the night of September 1, 1712, in the 51st year of the reign of Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty, Yin Hongxu wrote a long letter "Records of Chinese Ceramics" with a feather pen in the candlelight, which detailed the properties and production methods of kaolin white (pronounced: dǔn), the raw material for porcelain. Soon after, he wrote the letter "Supplement" to introduce the porcelain production methods he had learned with great difficulty. The two letters caused a sensation in Europe. In 1715, Yin Hongxu sent samples of kaolin to France. Half a century later, a surgeon discovered a rich reserve of kaolin in Limoges, Yin Hongxu's hometown, and a porcelain city quickly rose in Europe.
When the German scholar Ferdinand von Richthofen entered the land at the junction of Anhui and Jiangxi, the mining of kaolin had come to an end. He fell in love with this white jade-like soil, like a young man who was good at falling in love, and gave the soil an English name based on the pronunciation of Chinese: kaolin. Since then, the English word kaolin has frequently appeared in the European hall of elegance.
Suddenly I remembered a poem by Luo Qilan in the Qing Dynasty: "Don't blame the world for getting old easily, the green mountains also have white hair."
Tossing, running, changing, ups and downs, stunning, cold and lonely, these words make up the life of kaolin, and also make up the world of cold and warm wind and rain.
It is worth mentioning that there are more than 700 kaolin mines discovered in my country, but the per capita share is not optimistic. The kiln fires in Jingdezhen continue to light up the lives of people, and as the place where kaolin clay was named, Fuliang Gaoling Mountain became one of the first national mining parks on August 23, 2005, and is no longer disturbed by excessive mining. Time has quietly covered the vicissitudes of life, and the lush plants all over the mountain seem to be the language of the wind and rain Gaoling Mountain. (Text/Photo by Peng Wenbin)