Nyingchi
— — the week the peach trees turn the canyon pink.
Not only on a wall.
“A river valley in southeastern Tibet where the Yarlung Tsangpo cuts a canyon between Himalayan giants. For one week in late March the wild peach trees flower all at once, days before the high snow has any thought of melting. The villages keep their flat roofs stacked with juniper. Most of the year nobody comes; for that week the road from Lhasa is full.
Nyingchi, 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.
Nyingchi sits in southeastern Tibet at roughly 2,900 metres, where the Yarlung Tsangpo bends south through the deepest river canyon on Earth. The prefecture is anchored by Namcha Barwa, a 7,782-metre peak whose snowfields wall in the valley. The administrative seat, Bayi, lies about 400 kilometres east of Lhasa along National Highway G318. Forests of spruce and rhododendron cover the slopes, an anomaly for the Tibetan plateau driven by monsoon air pushed up the gorge from Assam.
The peach blossom runs roughly the last week of March into the first week of April. Wild Tibetan peach trees, not orchard cultivars, flower at the same moment along the river terraces around Bomi and Gala village. The bloom is short, sometimes only seven or eight days, and a hard rain ends it. Local festivals time to the petals: the Nyingchi Peach Blossom Festival has been held annually since 2002. Outside that week, the valley is quiet again until the rhododendrons take over in May.
Air comes up the gorge from the Brahmaputra plain, carrying enough moisture to grow temperate forest at an elevation where most of Tibet is steppe. Lulang Forest, an hour east of Bayi over the 4,702-metre Sejila Pass, holds stands of fir hung with old-man's beard lichen, a sign of clean wet air. The pass is the standard viewpoint for Namcha Barwa when the clouds open, which is rare. Locals will tell you the mountain shows itself maybe one morning in three.