The spirit of the soil

 When visitors come into the small house of the Thuan Trang Pottery shop in the Bau Truc Pottery village, Chau Thi Co takes a small portion of soil from the corner of the house to a dais and then starts her job.
She moves around and around the dais using her hands to make a small flower pot within ten minutes. “Its gray, but after burning the color changes into brown, the natural color,” she explains to visitors.
The village is ten kilometers south of Phan Rang City in the central province of Ninh Thuan. Around 70% of the local residents in the Cham village can make such products. The village has many shops like Thuan Trang to show the skillful hands and special baking technology of Cham people that turn the clay into extraordinary masterpieces unique to the village.
Co says she has had good times in recent years because the pottery village is reviving and she can do her traditional work.
“It’s the traditional work of our hometown. We love the job. Each product is unique because we don’t use any technology, by hands only,” says the 15-year veteran of pottery.
Normally, each household uses 20 wagons of clay per week. This is special clay of the village. “We can’t make good products by the clay of other places, that’s why we call the pottery products the spirit of the soil,” Co said.
The craftsmen leave the pottery in the sun for three days and then use wood and rice straw to burn it.
“We line a layer of wood at the bottom and then put the products on and then cover by a layer of straw. We burn it for around four hours. We don’t use any kind of chemical,” Co says.
For many hundred of years, craftsmen in Bau Truc village have been making pottery products for household use.
When living standards started to rise, the craftsmen of the village thought they wouldn’t be able to maintain the traditional work because people would want to use modem household goods.
“We are starting to make fine art products and we can keep the work though we earn just enough to live,” says Dang Huynh, a 74-year craftsman of the village.
There are three generations of his family doing the job. The elderly man looks after the Hand Made Pottery Showroom, the showroom of the village that displays many products of the village at budget prices. Visitors can buy one product for only thousands of Vietnam dong.
“Many buyers are Vietnamese. Foreigners also like it but can’t bring such products home because they are fragile,” says Huynh.
Huynh, Co and other craftsmen in the unique village are not alone in keeping the traditional work alive. The local government is helping to develop it into a strong tourist attraction and to raise living standards for the local residents.
“We are promoting traditional products by bringing them to exhibitions in big cities. The provincial government has spent billions of Vietnam dong to develop the infrastructure system here,” said Nguyen Tran Vuong from the Ninh Thuan Province Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism.