Huizhou
— — the lake the exiled poet kept writing about.
Not only on a wall.
“Huizhou holds a West Lake of its own, smaller and quieter than the famous one in Hangzhou, ringed by low hills and a pagoda the city has watched for centuries. Su Dongpo wrote here during his second exile, walked these banks, ate the lychees, and left the place threaded with poems. The old town keeps its bridges and its Hakka quarters; the East River runs slow past it toward the delta. A working southern city with a long memory.
Huizhou, 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.
Huizhou is a prefecture-level city in eastern Guangdong, about 100 kilometres northeast of Shenzhen and roughly 130 kilometres from Guangzhou. It sits on the East River (Dong Jiang), one of the three rivers that feed the Pearl River Delta, with a population of around six million across its districts and counties. The city stretches from the inland hills down to a stretch of the South China Sea coast at Daya Bay. Its old urban core grew up around West Lake and the surviving stretches of Ming-era city wall.
Huizhou's literary year still turns on the Song-dynasty poet Su Shi, known as Su Dongpo, who was exiled to the city in 1094 and lived here for nearly three years. He wrote dozens of poems about West Lake, the lychees, and the hills around Luofu Shan, and his cottage site is preserved on the lake's eastern shore. Luofu Mountain, about 60 kilometres north, is one of the ten great Taoist sacred mountains and has drawn pilgrims and herbalists for more than a thousand years.
West Lake in Huizhou covers about three square kilometres and is divided by causeways into five linked basins, the largest being Pinghu. The lake is older than the city around it and was reshaped by Su Dongpo during his exile, when he organised the building of a causeway and a bridge that still carry his name. The Sizhou Pagoda, a seven-storey brick tower from the Tang and Ming periods, stands on a small island in the lake and anchors the view across the water from the old town.