Last of its kind: kiln that made pots for post-war Hong Kong and the enthusiasts out to make it a living museum
Chamber pots, flower pots, soup pots – you name it, they were fired in the flames of a Tuen Mun dragon kiln, a type used in China since ancient times. The only one left in Hong Kong, ceramic artists are pushing for its preservation
Inside the long, narrow chamber of the dragon kiln, Hong Kong sculptor and ceramicist Louis Lo Sai-keung crouches next to stoneware pots called saggars, traditionally used in pottery to protect clay items – perhaps bowls, jugs, plates and decorative figurines – before and while they are being fired.
Rarely operated today, dragon kilns have been a part of China’s landscape for at least hundreds – and possibly thousands – of years, and are so named for being thin in shape and undulating long distances up hillsides, a slope being an essential element of their workings. Reaching temperatures of 1,300 degrees Celsius, the raging, brick-built kilns would glow red at night, like massive, fire-breathing dragons.
Though few such kilns are in use today, some survivors in China are 100 metres long, and allowed tens of thousands of ceramic pieces to be fired at once.
The Castle Peak Dragon Kiln, in Tuen Mun, in Hong Kong’s New Territories, is shorter but still impressive, at more than 20 metres. Though the shattered remains of similar kilns in Hong Kong date back hundreds of years, the intact Tuen Mun structure was built in the 1940s, but in the style of kilns that were employed for centuries in the making of Shiwan pottery. (Shiwan – today the Shiwanzhen subdistrict of the city of Foshan, in China’s Guangdong province – was famed for the artistry and quality of its ceramics.)
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Lo first visited the wood-fired dragon kiln as a 17-year-old, in 1973, carefully carrying a small clay sculpture he had made at home. Today, he and a dedicated coterie of ceramics and pottery experts, historians, educators and locals with family ties to the landmark are fighting to have the site preserved as a living museum.
