Dongguan
— — the river where the opium was burned.
Not only on a wall.
“Dongguan spreads across the eastern Pearl River Delta, a city of factories and freeway interchanges with a much older story under the concrete. At Humen, on the river's edge, Commissioner Lin Zexu had more than a thousand tons of British opium broken open and washed into the tide in the summer of 1839 — the act that brought on the First Opium War. A short drive away, the Qing-era Keyuan Garden still keeps its courtyards and koi. from the studio
Dongguan, 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.
Dongguan is a prefecture-level city in Guangdong on the east bank of the Pearl River Delta, sitting between Guangzhou to the northwest and Shenzhen to the south. Its 2020 census recorded just over 10.4 million residents in an area of about 2,460 square kilometres, making it one of the densest manufacturing economies on earth. The city has no urban districts in the usual Chinese sense; it is administered directly as 32 towns and subdistricts. Humen Town, on the river's mouth, holds the historical core of the prefecture and the site where the First Opium War began.
The defining year for Dongguan is 1839. In June, the Qing imperial commissioner Lin Zexu ordered more than 1,000 tons of British-trafficked opium destroyed in saltwater trenches at Humen, on the Pearl River's mouth — an act the British crown used as the pretext for the First Opium War the following year. The destruction took 23 days. The site is now the Lin Zexu Memorial Park and the Opium War Museum, with the brick trench foundations still visible and a long bronze relief running along the riverfront.
Five kilometres east of the river, in Keyuan, sits one of the four great classical gardens of Guangdong. Keyuan Garden was built in 1850 by the local official Zhang Jingxiu and laid out in the late-Qing Lingnan style — small in footprint, just over 2,200 square metres, but folded into more than a dozen courtyards, pavilions, fish ponds, and a four-storey wooden tower called the Yaoyue Lou, the Moon-Inviting Tower. The grey brick, white plaster, and dark camphor wood of the Lingnan vocabulary keep the interior cool through the long Guangdong summer.