Zhanjiang
— — the harbour the French left half a name to.
Not only on a wall.
“A port at the southern tip of mainland China, where the Leizhou Peninsula reaches toward Hainan. The French held it for forty-seven years and called it Fort-Bayard; the long boulevards and shuttered villas of Xiashan still carry that memory. Mangroves edge the harbour. Container ships pass slowly, and the oyster boats come back in before dawn.
Zhanjiang, 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.
Zhanjiang sits at the southern end of Guangdong province, on the Leizhou Peninsula across the strait from Hainan Island. The prefecture-level city covers about 13,260 square kilometres and holds a population near 7 million. Its deep natural harbour, formed where the South China Sea meets the peninsula's broken coast, made it one of China's earliest planned modern ports. The South Sea Fleet of the People's Liberation Army Navy is headquartered here, and the city anchors a network of mangrove reserves running along the Leizhou coast.
From 1898 to 1945 the bay was leased to France as the territory of Kouang-Tchéou-Wan, administered from what the French called Fort-Bayard. The lease followed the Scramble for Concessions that pulled European powers into late-Qing coastal China. Japanese occupation ended the arrangement in 1943, and the territory was formally returned in 1945. The old administrative district of Xiashan still holds the boulevards, arcades, and shuttered colonial villas of that period, now sitting alongside the post-1949 industrial port plan.
The Zhanjiang Mangrove National Nature Reserve protects roughly 20,000 hectares along the Leizhou coast, the largest contiguous mangrove area in mainland China. The shallow tidal flats grow Avicennia, Aegiceras, and Bruguiera, and shelter migratory shorebirds on the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. Offshore, the deep harbour handles iron ore, crude oil, and container traffic for southwestern China. The same protected water carries the city's oyster industry, centred on Guantian, whose flats ship to markets across Guangdong and into Hong Kong.