Shantou
— — a port that remembers being called Swatow.
Not only on a wall.
“A coastal city in eastern Guangdong, on the Han river delta, looking out at the South China Sea. Old Shantou's arcaded streets still carry the shop signs of the 1920s, when the port traded under the name Swatow. Teochew opera plays in the alleys around Xiaogongyuan; the gongfu tea trays come out at every hour. Chenghai's toy factories stretch inland. The diaspora is wide; the home city is small.
Shantou, 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.
Shantou is a coastal prefecture-level city in eastern Guangdong province, at the mouth of the Han river on the South China Sea. The urban population sits around 5.5 million. It was opened as a treaty port in 1860 under the Treaty of Tianjin, then known internationally as Swatow, and became one of China's first four Special Economic Zones in 1981. The Teochew, or Chaoshan, cultural region centres here, and the language spoken locally is a southern Min dialect distinct from Cantonese and Mandarin.
The Han river drains the mountainous interior of eastern Guangdong and reaches the sea at Shantou's harbour, where the city grew up around the inner anchorage. The South China Sea forms the southern edge. Shantou Bay, sheltered by Mayu and Nan'ao islands, has been a working port since the Ming dynasty. The Queshi scenic area, on a peninsula across the bay, links to the city centre by the Queshi Bridge, opened in 1995 as one of the first Chinese suspension bridges over open seawater.
The old town around Xiaogongyuan keeps the arcaded Qilou shopfronts of the treaty-port years, restored over the last decade. Nan'ao Island, reached by an eleven-kilometre bridge opened in 2015, holds beaches and a Ming-era naval garrison. Teochew cuisine sets the food agenda: hand-cut beef hot pot, oyster omelette, blanched seafood, and the gongfu tea ceremony of the Chaoshan plain. Shantou Chaoshan International Airport, about fifty kilometres north of the city centre, connects to Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, and Bangkok.