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The location of the Ding Kiln is in the Quyang County (called Dingzhou in the Song Dynasty), Hebei Province. It was built in the Tang Dynasty (618-907). The style was affected by the Xing Kiln in the Tang Dynasty.

The Ding Kiln was famous for its white porcelains. It used durable white clay as the roughcast, covered by white glaze. Carving, painting and printing were popular decoration methods for the Ding porcelains. In the early Song Dynasty, the decoration patterns were relatively simple, by the end of the Northern Song Dynasty the paintings were much more complicated. Some of the Ding porcelains were imperial contributions to the court.

Comparing to the other kilns, the Ding Kiln had a much larger production output. The Ding Kiln used a special overlap heating method in the furnace: the workers overlaped several vessels together in the furnace, while the other kilns only put one laye. Therefore the productivity of the Ding Kiln was much greater than others. The disadvantage of the overlay method was that when the vessels were touching together, the upper rim of the porcelains had no glaze. There kiln usually gilded a layer of copper, silver or gold on the rim. Today lots of the Ding Kiln's porcelains have been excavated, many of them have this characteristic metal rim.

Except for white glaze, the Ding Kiln also made other glaze colors such as green, black or brown. Sometimes the glaze flew down along the surface of the porcelain vessels and this phenomena was called the "tear drop".

 

Background Knowledge: History of China

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