A ceramic-made history of Saigon and its suburban regions

Foreign guests contemplete the collections in the exhibition

"If the guide spoke English better,” Alonso said, hinting at the desire to get to the in-depth knowledge, when we were leaving the exhibition “Ceramics of Saigon and the Suburban Regions”.

Like other Spanish tourists I met at the HCMC Museum on Ly Tu Trong Street, District 1, Alonso and his girl friend could not help expressively speaking out their satisfaction after contemplating rare and valuable ceramics on display there.

Maybe the museum management has had to go great lengths in organizing this exhibition, especially in persuading 11 local collectors, borrowing their valuable rare samples for a long time. Actually, all but the display windows and lighting are fantastic!

“In organizing this exhibition, the museum has collaborated with the Southern Women Museum, the HCMC Fine Arts Museum and 11 individual collectors. The exhibition introduces over 200 ceramic artifacts in order to show the distinctive features of the southern ceramic-making culture,” said the 24-year-old guide known by the name Thanh Tam.

Hundreds of ceramic artifacts, ranging from household goods such as flower vases, bowls and pots to real art works including small statues of Budha, Arhat or historical generals and even a meters-long screen, bear ‘colors of time,’ because they were all crafted from the late 17th to early 20th century. Visitors can readily find some smeares on the set of statues “Happiness, Wealth and Longevity”, but those stains cause it still more worthful.

As per the chosen topic, all of the exhibits were produced manually at pottery kilns in Saigon and its neighbouring regions including Lai Thieu (in Binh Duong Province) and Bien Hoa (Dong Nai Province). Actually, the ceramics trade has existed in Vietnam since the immemorable time.

Many famous place-names such as Lo Gom Canal (which iterally means “The Canal of Pottery Kilns”), Mieng Sanh Berth (or The Berth of Glazed Terra-Cotta), and Lo Gach Mountain (or Brick-Kiln Mountain) have shed light on the gilded age of busy craft villages in these areas since the late 17th century.

During such a time, Chinese refugees who were Ming Dynasty’s ceramics craftsmen immigrated to the South of Vietnam, especially to areas surrounding today’s Bien Hoa City. They knew how to tap the abundant clay source to develop a distinctive “ceramic triangle” including Saigon, Lai Thieu and Bien Hoa. The exchanges of styles, techniques and arts showed an openess in the “ceramics culture” in the area.

Saigon and the suburban regions were very famous for Cay Mai ceramics (Apricot Tree ceramics) with high-quality products that were used for decoration and worship, such as basins, small statues, and limepots among others.

The development of the craft producing ceramic products for such purposes as decoration, architecture and religion was especially visible in Saigon with numerous craftsmen, but the trade here also held differences with products from the two neighboring areas of Bien Hoa and Lai Thieu.

Many products of these diverse schools could be easily seen in such products as vases, basins, and pots. The God of Sun or the Moon Godness statues, four sacred animals, bas reliefs, and Buddha statues have now been conserved in temples, pagodas in the city as well as in the adjacent areas, and several provinces in the Mekong Delta.

Abundance in decorative motifs and variety in kinds of products were what that make ceramic products here distinctive. Classical motifs were used in the majority of Saigon ceramic products, but the development has been driven towards a more artistic approach, since the products boast both utilization and fine art in harmonious combination.

The trade-marks of kilns such as “Cay Mai”, “Dong Hoa” or “Nam Phong” labelled on Saigon ceramic products guaranteed their fames as high-grade products used for household appliance, decoration and architecture.

Formed in the late 17th century, the ceramics trade of Bien Hoa was the combination of the Vietnamese and Chinese styles. With the establishment of the Bien Hoa College of Art (1903), craftsmen from Cay Mai (Saigon) went there to teach the craft, that helped create the specific style of the “Art ceramics of Bien Hoa” which had been widely known until the 1950s.

The deep-engraving and glazing techniques onto the products, the combination between decoration and painting on ceramics as well as the introduction of unique glazes including cobalt, verdigris, and yellowish brown show the particular independence and the creativity of Bien Hoa ceramics.

Appearing around the mid-19th century, Lai Thieu pottery villages (Binh Duong Province) were known with multi-colored household ceramics including bowls, small bowls, vases… They boasted a harmonious generalization of the three schools of the southern Chinese ceramics - Guangdong, Fukien and Chaozhou. During the first decades of the 20th century, with the addition of the skills of the craftspeople from Saigon, Lai Thieu ceramics entered the stage of properous development.

Ceramics of Saigon and the suburban regions portray a period of glorious development which contributed to the spiritual and the material life of the people in the southern areas. Moreover, they were widely sold in the Southeast Asian market and beyond as the cultural products of Vietnam.

“We try to keep this exhibition as a regular activity here,” said the guide Thanh Tam. “The only problem is how to convince the private collectors to cooperate since they love their artifacts as their own children,” she stressed.

(Source: SGT)