Changchun
— — the city the snow holds for half the year.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Jilin Province, set on a flat northern plain that runs to the horizon. The boulevards are wide, the winters long, and Jingyuetan forest park to the southeast gives the city a quiet edge of pine and frozen lake. China's first production car came out of a factory here in 1956, and the place has been called the country's Detroit ever since.
Changchun, 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.
Changchun is the capital of Jilin Province in northeastern China, sitting on the central Songliao Plain at about 220 metres of elevation. The urban area held roughly 9 million residents on the 2020 census, making it the largest city in Jilin and one of the principal cities of the northeast. Winters are long and dry with January means well below freezing; summers are warm and short. The city was the capital of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo from 1932 to 1945 under the name Hsinking, and that period shaped its broad, planned street grid.
First Automobile Works, founded in Changchun in 1953, produced the Jiefang truck in 1956 and the Hongqi state limousine in 1958, and the city has been called China's Detroit ever since. The Changchun Film Studio, the country's first major postwar film studio, opened here in 1945. The Puppet Emperor's Palace, where Puyi lived under Japanese supervision from 1932 to 1945, is preserved as a museum on the city's northeast side. Each January the city stages an ice and snow festival that runs alongside the larger one in Harbin to the north.
Jingyuetan National Forest Park covers about 96 square kilometres on the southeast edge of the city, built around a reservoir that doubles as a Nordic-skiing venue when the lake freezes. The Vasaloppet China cross-country race has been held there most winters since 2003, drawing skiers from across Asia. The park's pine plantations were laid out in the early 1930s and are among the largest planted forests in northeast China. In summer the same paths fill with cyclists and walkers, and the lake reopens for boats once the ice is gone.