Ports of the world - Canton/Idols and Pottery

by the United States Bureau of Naval Personnel

IDOLS AND POTTERY

ANTON, besides being one of the strangest cities in the Orient, from the traveler's viewpoint, is also one of the principal manufacturing cities of the country. A majority of the industries in Canton are carried on by the 75 or so trade guilds, some of whom have entire districts devoted to the production of their respective wares.

The output of the Canton trade guilds includes hundreds of articles of merchandise, ranging from idols to pottery, and running the whole gamut of export goods—from hair, silk, embroideries, jade, carved woods, candied ginger, and other Chinese sweetmeats, to fans and lacquer ware.

The district of the blackwood-cutters' guild offers one of the most interesting sights in Canton. Few travelers ever visit the city without directing their sedan-chair coolies to carry them along Yuck Tsze and Tai-son-kai Streets, and the Old Factory district where most of the shops in the guild are located.

Solemn Chinamen squat in front of partially completed idols, whose mysterious faces are hardly more strange than the saffron countenances of their makers. The idol carvers, after putting the finishing touches on the images, cover them with gold leaf or gilt, and dispose of them to native purchasers, and sometimes to souvenir-seeking foreigners.

Natives engaged in turning out cabinets, chairs, buffets, tables, and other articles of the sort, will tell the visitor—with flickers of pride in their usually expressionless faces—that their ancestors worked in the same shop, making the same kind of articles, long before the "foreign devils" ever came to China. When the faltering hand of an aged father dropped the carving tools, leaving, say, an idol or a chair half completed, the youthful hand of his son would pick up the carving tools, and the son would carry on the work where his father left off—just as his father carried on the work after his grandfather and his grandfather carried on the work after his great grandfather, and so on down through the centuries. It is a fatalistic, initiative-destroying custom—typical of the strange manners and customs of old China.

Buddhist images and picture frames are sold in Siu-sen-kai; ivory and turquoise goods in Tai-sen-kai, Yuen-sek-hong, and Yuk-tsz-hong; sandalwood products in Hou-pun-kai; feather fans and embroideries in Chong-yuen-fong; sandalwood products and porcelain in Sen-tau-lan; and ivory, lacquer ware, and silver vessels in Sai-hing-kai.

Pottery manufactured in Canton is exported to nearly every country in the world, and doubtless many of the Americans and Europeans visiting the city ate their porridge or bread and milk from dishes made in Canton before they were old enough to know there was such a city.

The Cantonese make many kinds of pottery, from the delicately designed eggshell variety to the sturdy sort designed for use in restaurants and nurseries (where an ability to stand hard knocks is one of the qualities most desired in dishes).

 

Missionary Children and One American Girl, Canton

 

The soft clay is modeled into numerous designs, peculiarly and quaintly oriental. The utensils are baked to a stone hardness in red-hot kilns, after which they are painted with many colors, blue and red predominating, and then baked again until the colors are firmly attached to the pottery. Probably the best pottery shops in Canton are in the Sha-kee-tai-kai district, near the island of Shameen.