Baotou
— — a steppe city the river bends around.
Not only on a wall.
“A working city on the edge of the grasslands, where the Yellow River loops south and the Yinshan Mountains hold the northern sky. The Mongolian name means a place with deer. Today Baotou is a steel and rare-earth town, the freight yards lit late into the night, but at the eastern end the old Wudangzhao monastery still keeps its painted halls in a fold of the hills. The light over the steppe at evening goes the dusty pink of a thing left out in the sun.
Baotou, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Baotou is the largest city of Inner Mongolia by population, sitting on the north bank of the Yellow River where the river bends east toward Shanxi. The metropolitan area holds roughly 2.7 million people across the Kundulun, Qingshan and Donghe districts. The Mongolian name Bugutu translates as a place with deer. North of the city the Yinshan Mountains rise to the steppe; south, the river plain runs to the loess country.
About 150 kilometres north, the Bayan Obo mining district holds one of the world's largest deposits of rare-earth elements, alongside iron ore that feeds Baotou Iron and Steel, founded in 1954 under the First Five-Year Plan. East of the centre, Wudangzhao monastery dates to 1749, a Gelug-school Tibetan Buddhist complex in a sheltered valley of the Yinshan range, its white walls and flat roofs built in the Tibetan style rather than the Chinese.
The city sits at roughly 1,000 metres on the southern edge of the Mongolian plateau, with a cold semi-arid climate. Winters are dry and bitter, with January means well below freezing and the river icing along the banks. Summers are warm and short, with most of the year's modest rainfall arriving July and August. Spring brings dust off the Gobi to the north. The clearest light is autumn, when the steppe grass goes the colour of straw and the sky over the Yinshan reads almost lacquered.