Phù Lãng

Phù Lãng sits on the bank of the Cầu river, in Bắc Ninh, where the delta meets the first low hills. The village has fired pottery since the Trần period, and for most of that time it made the plain, strong wares that a farming household needed: jars for fish sauce and rice wine, water vats, pots for pickles, urns and the tiles and bricks of the countryside. The river carried the clay in and the finished pieces out by boat.

The glaze is what people remember. Fired with wood, the ash glaze runs from honey to deep chestnut and settles in a mottled brown the village calls eel skin. In recent decades a number of potters, several of them trained at art schools, have turned that glaze to new work: relief panels, vases, figures and wall pieces, built on the same clay and fired in the same kind of kiln. The utilitarian trade has shrunk, and fewer kilns are lit than a generation ago, but the village has found a second life in sculpture.

In good Phù Lãng work the glaze is never even. It pools darker in the hollows and thins to reddish clay on the high points, so relief decoration reads clearly. The body is dense and heavy for its size. Look for the marks of wood firing, ash speckles and a slight variation from one side of a piece to the other, which show where the flame passed. A piece that is uniformly brown and glossy has probably been fired with gas.