Ceramic manufacturing enjoys a long history, starting 7,000-8,000 years ago in the Neolithic Age by our ancestors who started the craft of making and using pottery. Pottery is made by baking clay. After humans learned how to start a fire and use it to cook, they tried many different methods to cook hunted animals and vegetation, and then store the remaining food and water. After a long period of attempts, humans finally learned to make pottery by baking clay mixed with water. Pottery includes the process of baking, forming, and drying clay or a mixture of clay, feldspar and quartz. Ceramics represent the artistic features of the baking and forming techniques, as well as the color of the glaze and its decorative features.

Yixing Violet Sand Earthenware

Yixing violet sand earthenware is the most famous pottery made using violet sand, a local material with a hard and fine texture, dark colors and exquisite workmanship. Different mixing techniques and baking temperatures create a variety of colors, such as azure, chestnut, dark red, pear yellow, vermillion purple, crabapple red, light grey, greenish black, and more. Yixing violet sand earthenware boasts varied shapes and delicate combinations of lines and planes. Two major designs exist, including imitations with certain variations on natural objects, such as fruits or flowers. Major products include tea sets, flower pots and others, with tea sets being the most famous, as they maintain the scent of the tea while infusing and the color during storage. Traditional techniques include engraving, bass-relief, printing, appliqués, and others.

Luoyang Tang Tricolor Pottery

Tang tricolor pottery is pottery painted with three colors of glaze, such as yellow, green and white or yellow, green and blue. Luoyang is located in the northern province of Henan, and is known as the Eastern Capital of the Tang Dynasty. The finest quality Tang tricolor potteries unearthed so far are mainly from Luoyang. They are vivid and exquisite, and have been named Luoyang Tang tricolor pottery. The making of Tang tricolor pottery is complex yet inconsequential. First, the base is placed into the kiln and heated to around 1100 deg.C. It is then removed, colored and heated again to around 900 deg.C. The major ingredient of tricolor glaze is aluminum silicate, and the color generation toner consists of various metallic oxides, such as ferrum or antimony in light yellow, ferrum in ocher yellow, bronze in green, copper, cobalt in blue and manganese in purple.

Qingzhou Nixing Pottery

Nixing pottery of Qinzhou in Guangxi Province, one of the four famous types of pottery, has a history of over one thousand years, and the oldest pieces were produced around 618 AD.

Through the unique quality of the clay and its delicate craftsmanship, Qinzhou Nixing pottery appears archaic, with a bronze or liver color. It displays a flambé glaze and turns azure after being fired in high temperatures. Moreover, it becomes smoother with polishing. The assortment of Nixing pottery items is over 600, with the major ones being tea sets, stationery, tableware, vases, coffee utensils, incense tripods and antique imitations. Nixing pottery is also popular because of its peculiar functions. It can withstand strong acids and bases, keeps things fresh against the dampness and is non- toxic. It also maintains the taste and color of tea for days, and even in hot weather, tea stored in the pottery does not spoil. This also applies to food. Moreover, a tea scent remains in the pot after it has been used for a long time, and the scent exists, even without tea, by pouring hot water into the pot.