Luoyang
— — the capital thirteen dynasties came home to.
Not only on a wall.
“One of the four great ancient capitals of China, seat of rulers from the Eastern Zhou through the Tang. The Longmen Grottoes hold something like a hundred thousand Buddhist figures cut into the limestone cliffs above the Yi River, the work of four centuries of patrons. In April the peony fields outside the city open, and the old capital remembers itself as the city of flowers.
Luoyang, 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.
Luoyang sits on the south bank of the Luo River in western Henan Province, central China, where the river meets the Yi at the southern edge of the city. Thirteen dynasties placed their capital here, beginning with the Xia and extending through the Eastern Zhou, the Eastern Han, the Western Jin, the Northern Wei, and the Sui and Tang. The modern prefecture-level city holds about seven million people. The Longmen Grottoes and the White Horse Temple are both cultural anchors of the region.
The Longmen Grottoes line two limestone cliffs along the Yi River, about twelve kilometres south of central Luoyang. Carving began under the Northern Wei in 493 and continued for more than four hundred years through the Tang. The site holds roughly 2,345 caves and niches and over 100,000 Buddhist statues, the largest the seventeen-metre Vairocana of Fengxian Temple, completed in 676 under Empress Wu Zetian. The grottoes were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2000.
The Luoyang Peony Cultural Festival opens in mid-April and runs about three weeks. The peony has been cultivated here since the Sui dynasty, and the Tang court treated the Luoyang varieties as the standard for the imperial gardens. Today more than a thousand cultivars grow in city parks, with Wangcheng Park and the National Peony Garden as the main display sites. The festival draws several million visitors each spring and gives the city its second name, the city of flowers.