Handan
— — a city whose name became a proverb.
Not only on a wall.
“Capital of the Zhao for 158 years before the Qin armies came through. The Congtai terrace still holds its corner of the old city, ringed now by a coal-and-steel grid that runs east toward the plain. The Taihang range stands behind it. A place whose name became a Chinese proverb about losing your own walk.
Handan, 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.
Handan sits in the south of Hebei province, on the western edge of the North China Plain where the Taihang Mountains begin to rise. The city has been continuously inhabited for roughly 3,100 years and was the capital of the Zhao state during the Warring States period, from 386 to 228 BCE, until the Qin conquest. Today it is a prefecture-level city of about 9.4 million, the heart of an industrial corridor between Beijing and Zhengzhou, and the eastern terminus of several old caravan routes through the mountain passes.
The Wuling Congtai, raised by King Wuling of Zhao in the early fourth century BCE, still occupies a corner of the old town. The king is remembered for the reform that put his cavalry into the trousers of the northern nomads, abandoning the long robes of the Central Plain. The platform that survives is a Qing-era rebuild atop the original earthworks. Around it: a public park, a small municipal museum, and the cypresses planted by successive dynasties marking the site as ground worth keeping.
Handan gave the Chinese language one of its most-quoted idioms — handan xuebu, 邯郸学步, learning to walk the Handan way. The story in the Zhuangzi describes a young man from Shouling who came to Handan to learn the city's elegant walk, failed, forgot his own, and crawled home. The phrase is two and a half millennia old and still in daily use, taught to schoolchildren as a warning against imitation that costs you what you already had. The city has built a small park around the supposed crawling-home road.