Jiaxing
— — a town the canal walks through.
Not only on a wall.
“A canal city in the flat green country between Shanghai and Hangzhou, where the Grand Canal still carries barges past stone bridges and whitewashed water-lane houses. The old quarter at Yuehe Street keeps its tea shops, zongzi steamers, and dumpling counters open into the evening. Just south of town, South Lake holds a single small island and a single small pleasure boat — the boat where, in the summer of 1921, a handful of young men finished founding what became the Chinese Communist Party.
Jiaxing, 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.
Jiaxing is a prefecture-level city in northern Zhejiang Province, on the Hangjiahu Plain between Shanghai roughly 90 kilometres to the northeast and Hangzhou roughly 90 kilometres to the southwest. The Grand Canal, the world's longest artificial waterway, passes directly through the old city, and Jiaxing has been a market node on it since the Sui dynasty in the seventh century. The city's resident population is around 5.5 million across its districts and county-level cities, including the canal towns of Wuzhen and Xitang.
Water is the organising fact of Jiaxing. The Grand Canal threads the centre, and a finer mesh of secondary canals and rivers connects every neighbourhood, market, and silk town in the prefecture. South Lake — Nanhu — sits just south of the old city, a shallow freshwater lake about 600 hectares in area, ringed by willow embankments and crossed by causeways out to small islands. The old water-lane quarter along Yuehe Street keeps the original alignment of stone bridges and lane-side houses that step down into the canal.
On a boat anchored in South Lake in late July or early August 1921, the closing session of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party reconvened after the original Shanghai meeting was disrupted by police. A replica red-canopied pleasure boat now sits permanently at the South Lake Revolutionary Memorial Hall, and the site draws large numbers of visitors each year around July 1, the Party's founding anniversary. Jiaxing is also famous for its zongzi — sticky-rice parcels wrapped in bamboo leaves, eaten across China during the Dragon Boat Festival.