Jiangmen
— — the home the diaspora came back to.
Not only on a wall.
“A prefecture city on the west side of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong, about a hundred kilometres southwest of Guangzhou. The five counties that make it up — Xinhui, Taishan, Kaiping, Enping, Heshan — are the Wuyi, the historical homeland of most early Chinese emigration to the United States, Canada and Australia. Out among the rice paddies and banana groves of Kaiping stand the diaolou, fortified concrete watchtowers built in the 1920s and 30s by villagers using remittance money from overseas relatives, listed by UNESCO in 2007. from the studio
Jiangmen, 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.
Jiangmen is a prefecture-level city on the western Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province, roughly a hundred kilometres southwest of Guangzhou and across the estuary from Zhuhai and Macau. The administrative area covers about 9,500 square kilometres and a population of around 4.8 million, including the five Wuyi counties of Xinhui, Taishan, Kaiping, Enping and Heshan. The Xi River cuts through the old town. The region is known throughout the Chinese-speaking world as the qiaoxiang, the home district, of a significant share of the historical overseas Chinese diaspora.
Out in the Kaiping countryside around 1,800 diaolou still stand among the rice fields, fortified towers between four and nine storeys high built between roughly 1900 and 1940. Villagers raised them with remittance money from sons working in San Francisco, Vancouver and Sydney, mixing Greek columns, Italianate balconies and Chinese roofs onto reinforced concrete shells meant to keep bandits out. UNESCO inscribed Kaiping Diaolou and Villages on the World Heritage List in 2007 — four cluster sites: Zili, Jinjiangli, Sanmenli and Majianglong. The Ruishi Lou at Jinjiangli, completed in 1923, runs nine storeys.
Jiangmen is about ninety minutes by intercity train from Guangzhou South and reachable by car from Hong Kong over the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge in under three hours. The Kaiping diaolou clusters lie 30 to 50 kilometres west of central Jiangmen and are usually visited as a loop by hired car or local tour; Zili Village and Jinjiangli are the most photographed and have ticketed entry. In central Xinhui, the Liang Qichao former residence honours the reformist scholar born here in 1873. The city's signature dish is Xinhui chenpi, sun-aged mandarin peel used in soups across Cantonese cooking.