Jianshui is a small city south of Kunming with a well-preserved old town, and it is one of the four traditional pottery centres of China. The local clay, fired without glaze, comes out in a range of purples and browns, and the ware is finished by polishing and by carving or filling with coloured clay, so that a teapot carries incised calligraphy or a landscape in a second colour. Workshops line one street of the old town, and most of them fire, throw and carve on the premises.
The pottery
The best-known product is the teapot, and Jianshui pots are collected the way Yixing pots are. The clay is fine and dense, the walls are thin, and because the ware is unglazed the body is slightly porous, which is said to take on the flavour of the tea brewed in it. Beyond teapots the workshops make jars, vases, brush pots, water pots for calligraphy, and storage vessels. Look for the carving: a design is cut into the leather-hard body and a slip of a contrasting clay worked into the cut, then the piece is polished with a stone after firing, which gives the surface its soft sheen rather than a glaze.
The steam pot and the chicken
The same clay produces Jianshui's most famous cooking vessel: a steam pot with a central chimney, in which the chicken is cooked by steam rising through the middle and condensing back into the pot, so the dish makes its own broth without added water. Steam pot chicken, qiguo ji, is a Yunnan classic - chicken, ginger, sometimes medicinal herbs, and nothing else, steamed for hours into a clear, intensely flavoured soup. Restaurants in Jianshui and in Kunming serve it, and the pot itself is a practical souvenir that weighs little more than a teapot.
Practical notes
Jianshui is about three hours from Kunming by road, and is reachable by train to the Jianshui area; the old town, the Confucian temple, the Zhu family garden and the pottery street are all within walking distance of each other, so it works well as an overnight. Workshops sell at prices well below what the same pieces fetch in Kunming or Beijing, and larger pieces can be packed and shipped. Ask before photographing inside a working studio, and expect some pieces to be seconds - the sellers are usually straightforward about which is which.
