Red River
— the colour of the hill it took with it.
Not only on a wall.
“The river the Chinese call Yuan Jiang in its upper course and Hong He where the iron tributaries join. It begins in the Wuliang Mountains of Yunnan and runs about a thousand kilometres to the sea, carrying red silt out of the laterite hills above Yuanyang. By July the water runs the colour of brick. The Hani rice terraces sit in its valleys, holding their own slow light.
Red River, 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.
The Red River rises in the Wuliang Mountains of Yunnan in south-west China and runs roughly 1,149 kilometres south-east before emptying into the Gulf of Tonkin near Haiphong, Vietnam. In China it is called Yuan Jiang in its upper course and Hong He where the iron-rich tributaries turn it red; in Vietnam it becomes the Sông Hồng. It passes Yuanyang County, where the Hani rice terraces, inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage cultural landscape in 2013, drop in long curves down the tributary valleys.
The river runs red for the same reason the soil of Yunnan runs red: iron oxide weathered out of laterite hill country and carried by the monsoon. Through the dry winter months the water clears to a green-brown; by July and August, after rain pulls more silt off the slopes, it deepens to a true brick-red that holds for weeks. Downstream, the same sediment built the Red River Delta around Hanoi, one of the most fertile alluvial plains in Southeast Asia.
The river runs on a clear monsoon cycle. Dry season holds from November through April: lower flow, clearer water, the rice terraces above Yuanyang full of reflective standing water. Wet season runs May through October, and the river carries its heaviest load of red silt. The Hani people, who have farmed these slopes for more than a thousand years, plant and harvest in time with the river's rhythm. The terraces frost lightly in January and turn green again in May.