Phước Tích

The village was settled in the fifteenth century on a loop of the Ô Lâu river, north of what would become Huế. The river brought clay and carried the finished pots away by boat. Phước Tích ware was never glazed or painted. It was kitchen work — rice pots, water jars, braziers, pots for slow-cooked fish — and under the Nguyễn it was good enough to be ordered for the palace kitchens. The prosperity of those centuries is visible in the village itself: lanes of old timber houses under fruit trees, family temples and shrines, many of them more than a hundred years old.

Through the twentieth century the craft nearly stopped. Aluminium and enamel replaced clay in most kitchens, and the young left for Huế. Since the village was protected for its houses, a few households and a small workshop have taken up the wheel again, and the old dragon kiln on the riverbank has been fired on occasion. Today pottery here is quiet and small in scale. What you find is a handful of potters, a museum of sorts in the lanes, and a village that remembers clearly what it used to make.

Good Phước Tích work is light for its size and rings when tapped. The red-brown body should be even, with the faint shadow of wood ash and flame on one side rather than a uniform colour. The pots are meant for use. A rice pot that has been seasoned on a fire is not damaged; it is finished.