Where is the black pottery in Fotou Temple?

Fotou Temple black pottery is a geographical indication trademark.

Black pottery in the Yellow River estuary is the essence of life culture in the Yellow River basin. Because the origin of black pottery is Fotousi Village, Shengtuo Town, Kenli County, it is also called "Fotou Black Pottery". Fotousi village has unique natural red mud in the lower reaches of the Yellow River, which is the first-class raw material for firing pottery. Fotou black pottery has a history of more than 200 years. The raw material used is the red mud that naturally falls more than 0/0 meter underground of the Yellow River. It is developed and produced by local artists combined with traditional pottery clay technology, and it is the crystallization of "fire" and "earth".

According to legend, in the second year of Hongwu in Ming Dynasty (1369), Shanxi immigrants and Li came to settle in the Yellow River estuary. They set up huts, dug earth and made stoves, and began the day of slash and burn. Because there was no money to buy the utensils needed for life, I came up with the idea of burning it myself with yellow river mud.

The original production process of black pottery is quite simple. Fix a wooden stake on the ground with an iron column with a sharp tip at the top. The iron column holds a disk the size of a pot cover. In order to prevent the disk from tilting, an abandoned wooden axle head is fixed in the center of the disk and then placed on a stake. When making, one person stomps on the edge of the board with his foot to make it rotate quickly. The craftsmen piled the prepared mud on wooden trays, and with the help of rotating force, they beat the mud into various shapes of utensils by hand. After the blank is dried in the shade, it is fired in a kiln and fumigated for several days, and the mud blank becomes tile-shaped, that is, pots and pans commonly used by people. These spontaneous clay pottery are cheap and durable. Put the soup porridge in a pottery jar and send it to the ground to air dry for a few hours without spoiling. Because of these characteristics, the pottery clay of Fotou Temple was exported to Binxian, Putai (now Boxing County), Haifeng (now Wudi County), Zhanhua, Yangxin, Lijin and other places at that time, and was deeply loved by people. The two-part allegorical saying circulated at that time: "The yellow pot of Fotou Temple-one set" shows the influence of the clay of Fotou Temple in the Yellow River estuary.

This craft has been carefully studied and improved by generations of old folk artists. This product is deeply loved by handicraft lovers for its simple and elegant shape, exquisite carving, generous shape and pattern. It has the characteristics of "color as ink, sound as bell, thin as paper, bright as mirror and hard as porcelain" and has the reputation of "the flower of Qilu black pottery".