Chengdu
— — a teahouse afternoon that goes on.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Sichuan sits on the western edge of a fertile basin ringed by mountains. Its old quarters keep a habit of slowness — wicker chairs lining the teahouses of People's Park, jasmine steeping in glass, the click of mahjong tiles into evening. Beyond the ring roads the giant pandas hold court at Chenghua, and beyond them the road climbs west toward the edge of the Tibetan plateau. from the studio
Chengdu, 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.
Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan Province in southwestern China, set in the western Sichuan Basin at roughly 500 metres above sea level. The municipal area holds about 21 million people and traces continuous settlement back more than 2,300 years to the Shu kingdom. The Min River and its tributaries shape the surrounding plain, irrigated since 256 BCE by the Dujiangyan system, an engineering work still in daily use and inscribed by UNESCO in 2000. The land tilts west from the city toward the steep eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau.
The plain that holds Chengdu was made workable by Li Bing, who in 256 BCE divided the Min River at Dujiangyan, 55 kilometres northwest of the city, without building a dam. The works split the river around an artificial island, irrigated the basin, and tamed the floods that once destroyed the rice harvest. They still run today, operated by gravity, on a river that drops from the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. UNESCO inscribed the site in 2000 as both a cultural and a living engineering landscape.
The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, north of the city, holds the largest captive panda population in the world, over 200 animals across more than 100 hectares of bamboo enclosure. The Wuhou Shrine honours Zhuge Liang, the 3rd-century Shu statesman; Du Fu's Thatched Cottage commemorates the Tang poet who lived here for nearly four years and wrote more than 240 surviving poems on the site. Sichuan cuisine, recognised by UNESCO as a City of Gastronomy in 2010, runs hot with Sichuan peppercorn and dried chilli.