Li pottery making skills fire up in Sanya

Crafstwomen make Li pottery by hand. [Photo/Hainan Daily]

Located in Buqu village in Sanya, the Li Nationality Primitive Pottery Making Skills Training Center was unveiled in 2012 to ensure standardized and effective protection, display and inheritance of Li pottery. 

The pottery making process consists of 12 steps: excavating clay, selecting clay, drying clay in the sun, crushing clay, screening clay, mixing clay, blanking, drying, preparation for pottery firing, pottery firing, removing the pottery from the oven, and reinforcement. Finished products are mainly kettles, rice pots, urns, bowls, jars, wine distillers and rice cookers.

The training center inherited the primitive pottery craftsmanship such as the clay-strip forming method and open-air firing technique. 

"It takes time and labor to make Li pottery, and the firing process can cause broken pottery due to poor control of the heat and other reasons. Sometimes, the firing success rate is only 50 percent," said Dong Fusheng, head of the training center. He started to help his mother make Li pottery at the age of eight.

In order to drive the sales and inheritance of Li pottery, Dong's Li Pottery Cooperative was established in 2014 and has grown from six people to 80 people. More and more are people showing interest in learning how to make Li pottery.

The training center recently introduced some modern equipment to solve the difficulty of temperature control, irregular coloring, low hardness, rough texture and fragility. "Now, Li pottery skills are well inherited, and I believe that it will get better in the future," Dong said.