Nantong
— the river that opens to the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“A river-mouth city on the north bank of the Yangtze, in Jiangsu, looking south across the channel toward the long approach of Shanghai. Nantong is the place the industrialist Zhang Jian rebuilt at the turn of the twentieth century, with schools, cotton mills, and a public museum that opened in 1905. The water still carries everything that matters here.
Nantong, 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.
Nantong is a prefecture-level city in eastern Jiangsu province, on the north bank of the Yangtze near the river's mouth, directly across the channel from Shanghai. The municipality holds a population of roughly 7.7 million across its districts and counties, with the urban core sitting between the river and a network of canals that drain the surrounding plain. The city is reached from Shanghai by the Sutong Bridge, opened in 2008, which crosses the Yangtze in a single cable-stayed span of 1,088 metres, among the longest of its kind in the world at completion.
The Yangtze defines the city. Nantong's port sits at the head of the deep-water channel that runs to the East China Sea, and the river here is wide enough that the south bank reads as a low grey line on most days. A second river, the Tonglü, threads through the older districts and feeds the moat around what was once the walled town. The river traffic is constant: container ships heading down to Shanghai, sand barges, fishing boats from the nearby town of Lüsi. Tidal flats run for kilometres east of the city.
The Nantong Museum, founded in 1905 by the industrialist Zhang Jian, is generally recognised as the first public museum established by a Chinese citizen. It still operates at the original site in the city's old quarter, set in a garden park near the South Lake. Most visitors begin there, then walk to Hao River Park and the restored sections of the city wall. Crossings from Shanghai run about two hours by car across the Sutong Bridge, or roughly an hour and a half by high-speed rail through the new Tongzhou Bay corridor.