Terracotta workshop

man making planter, originally uploaded by kristie lee.

I took an afternoon detour to District 9, which is quite far away from the center of Saigon, to see a ceramics workshop that I saw on one of the Vietnamese language TV channels. On the way there, I passed by many terracotta brick workshops. The rows of bricks laid out to dry striped the landscape. We got a little lost, and had to pull into one of these workshops to ask for directions. We stopped at one of the giant bee-hive kilns that the workers were bricking up. I noticed that next to the stack of fire wood was a pile of neoprene leftovers from the different parts of sport shoe manufacturing. Guess they use that stuff for feeding the kiln too. I tried to figure out what brand of shoe they were from, but we got the directions to our destination and hurried off.
We arrived at the correct workshop and we just walked in and started to wander around. Most everyone was on their lunch break, but a few enterprising souls were still hard at work. Everyone smiled at us and kindly answered our questions as they continued their work. The first man we spoke with was building these really large terracotta pots--they came to my mid-thigh in height. He was the leanest, most muscular, skinniest man I have ever seen. He would grab a hunk of fresh clay, knead it, and then make a base with a short wall. He didn't need to measure anything. He just new the thickness the clay had to be from making many of these already (I wonder how many he has made in his lifetime?). A little more clay, and the walls started to raise. He only had shorts on (dirt floor, no shoes), and he walked around his pedestal--circling and circling. He said he could make 10 of these large pots each day, from start to finish (see the photo of the finished pots) and was paid 10,000 VND for each one he made. That comes to about $6.00 USD a day.
There were families here. As we moved toward the glazing area, I saw a little girl handing pots to a woman seated at a work bench glazing. The little girl couldn't have been more than 4 years old. Around the corner, I saw a canopied bed right there in the glazing area--it was clearly in recent use and clearly someone's living quarters judging by the laundry hanging about and the dirty dishes on the floor.
Vietnam is known for their pottery carving skills. The Vietnamese craftspeople can do the most delicate and intricate ceramic carvings by hand. This was definitely not one of those hi-end type of workshops, but it gives you a glimpse of life in a small ceramic workshop.