A Pottery Village Extroidinaire

In the middle of our stay in Mandaly we took a side trip with our friend Soe Soe a little further north. Remember the barge on the river in Yangon that was unloading ceramics? Well I did a little research and we went to the village that made a lot of it. There were actually four villages that all produced pottery. In the one village alone there were hundreds of workers and the village had a proserous air unlike many villages in Burma.
We had to take a bus about four hours north and then spend the night. There are only limited numbers of guesthouses licensed to have foreign guests so there was little choice. It was the worst one for value that we stayed in the whole trip to Burma.The next day we got a local open truck type bus to another village 15 km away. From there we walked to the Han Win Saw Pottery in Nwe Nyien village. Along the way the river bank was covered with pottery waiting to be shipped, like a moving baazar on a southward journey.
When we got to the pottery it was actually closed for a four day, full moon festival. We found one lone potter and his family and a group of other workers, who were probably supposed to be minding the place, drinking the local spirits. They wanted their picture taken with their brother 'Philip'.
The potter was actually a 'thrower' and his wife turned his wheel using her hands. It was built into the ground and was flush with the floor where they both sat or squatted to work. It was fantastic because Soe Soe could translate for us and the potter realized we had a lot in common with him and that we understood what he was doing.
He used much softer clay than we do and he said it took 45 minutes to prepare the clay and make the planter you see him working on. For this he and his wife received 300 kyats which is the equivalent to about 40 cents. He said they worked about 10 hours a day and made 3,000 kyats. In the end we gave him about the equivalent of a days pay hoping he could now take the day off to go to the festival. He was 41 years old and had learned from his father.
As you can see the kids followed us around until they were asked to stop, we couldn't see anything because they were crowding around us. There is one picture of he and his daughter. It may have been a mixed blessing that it was closed because maybe nobody could have spared the time to show us how it worked otherwise.
He told us that he only generally knew the other processes because he was a thrower only. We would have loved to see the decoraters at work. There were ten kilns, each the size of a large long room. Rice husks were put between the pots if they were stacked in the kiln and they were wood fired. The only small items we saw were about 8 inch high vases and the pots the woman is making in the pictures, other than those everything was really big, waist high to me.
When we reached the guys the word that we had given money to the thrower preceded us and one drunken guy dragged us to another building to see his wife throw. We were onto him though and devised a plan to leave the building with him afterwards and then I slipped back and gave her money and some hairclips for she and her daughter, who was spinning the wheel with her foot. We didn't want the money to go to him.
After a meal in the heart of the village and tea in a teahouse we got a shared truck home. It had to stop every few miles to pour water over the engine to keep it from overheating but it was a lot of fun as it was full of locals and we all got along well with Soe Soe putting in the odd word for us between the smiles and gesturing.
We are determined to return to document these villages and their potteries before the winds of change pass through. It is probably the same today as it was hundreds of years ago.I have lots of pictures to go with this blog but I'm on an island with iffy internet and it won't upload.......