Wuyi Mountains
— the dark leaf the cliff teaches the water to make.
Not only on a wall.
“A range of red sandstone peaks in northern Fujian, cut through by the Nine-Bend River. The cliffs grow the rock tea Wuyi is known for — small leaves out of thin soil, smoke and stone in the cup. Bamboo rafts run the river. The neo-Confucian academy where Zhu Xi taught in the twelfth century still stands at the river's third bend.
Wuyi Mountains, 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 Wuyi Mountains run along the border between Fujian and Jiangxi in southeastern China, with the scenic core sitting just west of Wuyishan City in Nanping Prefecture. The range was inscribed by UNESCO as a mixed cultural and natural World Heritage site in 1999, covering some 999 square kilometres. Its highest peak, Huanggang Shan, reaches 2,158 metres, while the photographed core around the Nine-Bend River climbs more modestly to ridges near 700 metres above the gorge floor.
Wuyi's signature cliffs are Cretaceous Danxia landform — coarse red sandstones and conglomerates eroded into vertical bluffs and isolated columns. The same rock grows the tea. Wuyi rock tea, or yancha, takes its character from the thin mineral soil that collects in cliff hollows; Da Hong Pao, the most famous cultivar, traces back to six mother bushes still standing on a ledge above the Jiulongke gorge, last harvested commercially in 2006 and now preserved by the local government.
The Nine-Bend River, Jiuqu Xi, threads roughly nine and a half kilometres of red gorge through the heart of the range, bend by bend, beneath thirty-six named peaks. Bamboo rafts poled by two boatmen carry visitors downstream in about ninety minutes. At the third bend stands the Wuyi Jingshe site, where the philosopher Zhu Xi taught from 1183 and laid the textual foundations of Song-dynasty neo-Confucianism that shaped East Asian thought for the next seven centuries.