Chaozhou
— — a Teochew city the river still keeps.
Not only on a wall.
“An old port city on the lower Han River in eastern Guangdong, capital of the Teochew people and their cuisine. Chaozhou holds many centuries of layered building: a Tang-era Buddhist hall at Kaiyuan, a Song-era pontoon bridge that opens at midday for boat traffic, a restored ceremonial street of granite arches. Most of the country knows it for its tea ceremony, its beef hot pot, and the ports its merchants seeded across Southeast Asia.
Chaozhou, 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.
Chaozhou is a prefecture-level city in eastern Guangdong on the lower Han River, about 360 km northeast of Guangzhou and close to the coast at Shantou. The old city walls follow the river bank for around 2.6 km and still hold their stone gates. The municipality records around 2.6 million residents and is the cultural seat of the Teochew (Chaoshan) diaspora, whose merchant communities spread through Bangkok, Penang, Singapore, and Saigon from the seventeenth century onward. The city is a National Famous Historical and Cultural City designated by the State Council in 1986.
The Han River runs south past the old city on its way to the South China Sea at Shantou. Spanning it is the Guangji Bridge, one of the four great ancient bridges of China, finished in 1170 during the Southern Song. Eighteen stone piers carry fixed stone spans at either end, with a central section made of pontoon boats lashed together — opened daily around midday to let boat traffic through, then closed again. The bridge takes its modern restored form from a 2003–2007 rebuild based on Ming-dynasty drawings.
Inside the old walls, Paifang Street runs about a kilometre along Taiping Road and carries twenty-three reconstructed stone ceremonial arches, each commemorating a Chaozhou scholar, official, or filial son raised under the imperial system. North of the street, Kaiyuan Temple was founded in 738 during the Tang dynasty and still preserves its Tang plan around a stone-paved court. The carved wooden brackets, the Song-era iron incense burner, and the Yuan-era lotus column bases are the older survivals among layers of later Ming and Qing repairs.