Nanchang
— — the river the pavilion watches.
Not only on a wall.
“The Gan River runs north through the city toward Poyang Lake, and the Tengwang Pavilion has watched it since the seventh century. The current pavilion is the twenty-ninth rebuild; the bones of the original were lost long ago. In autumn the haze sits low over the water and the upper galleries seem to float above it.
Nanchang, 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.
Capital of Jiangxi Province in southeastern China, with a metropolitan population of roughly 6.2 million. The city sits on the lower Gan River about forty kilometres south of Poyang Lake, the country's largest freshwater body. Its anchor is the Tengwang Pavilion, first raised in 653 by Li Yuanying, brother of the Tang emperor Taizong. The pavilion has been destroyed and rebuilt twenty-nine times across thirteen centuries. Nanchang is also called the City of Heroes for the August 1927 uprising that gave rise to what became the People's Liberation Army.
Tengwang Pavilion is counted among the Three Great Towers of southern China, with Yueyang and Yellow Crane. The present building rises 57.5 metres across nine apparent storeys, three of them hidden inside the structure. Reinforced concrete carries the weight; the bracket sets, sweeping eaves, and green tile follow a Song-dynasty plan drafted by the school of the architect Liang Sicheng. The pavilion is best known through Wang Bo's *Preface to the Tengwang Pavilion*, written at a banquet here in 675 when the poet was twenty-six, and still memorised by Chinese schoolchildren.
The Gan River drains most of Jiangxi and empties into Poyang Lake forty kilometres downstream. Poyang is China's largest freshwater lake by surface area, swelling above three thousand square kilometres in the summer flood and shrinking by more than half in dry winter. The shoreline draws Siberian cranes; over ninety percent of the world's remaining wild population winters there each year between November and March. From the upper galleries of Tengwang Pavilion the river bends west, wide and slow toward the lake.