Xuzhou
— — a city that keeps remembering older cities.
Not only on a wall.
“Xuzhou sits on ground that has been a capital, a battlefield, and a railway junction in turn. The old name was Pengcheng. Han-dynasty tombs are cut into the hills above the city, and Yunlong Lake holds the south side. The morning streets smell of mutton soup and sesame flatbread, even in winter. — from the studio
Xuzhou, 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.
Xuzhou is a prefecture-level city of roughly nine million in northern Jiangsu, near the borders of Shandong, Henan, and Anhui. It sits on the North China Plain at the junction of the Beijing-Shanghai and Longhai railway lines, a transit hinge since the early twentieth century. The city's southern edge is anchored by Yunlong Mountain and Yunlong Lake, and the Grand Canal still passes through the prefecture on its long course between Hangzhou and Beijing. The old walled core has been rebuilt many times across two thousand years of contested ground.
The site was known as Pengcheng for most of recorded history, and it gave the Han dynasty its founding emperor: Liu Bang, born in the third century BC in a village nearby. Three large Han royal tombs cut into the hills outside the city — at Guishan, Beidongshan, and Shizishan — survive with their stone chambers intact. The Xuzhou Museum holds the gilt-bronze leopards and jade burial suits recovered from inside them, along with terracotta cavalry from the Shizishan pit. The city has been sacked, rebuilt, and renamed across more than twenty centuries.
Xuzhou is one of the great repositories of Han-dynasty stone relief art. The Han Stone Carving Art Museum on Yunlong Mountain holds more than a thousand carved slabs lifted from tombs across the region, depicting chariots, banquets, dragons, and acrobats in incised low relief. The work was made for the dead, sealed in dark chambers, and recovered only as farmers and archaeologists opened the mounds. The same motifs — coiled dragons, hunting parties, the receiving of guests — turn up on temple walls and tea-house screens in the modern city, two millennia later.