Dai Slow-Wheel Pottery Technique

The Dai slow-wheel pottery craft, distinguished by a toe-driven slow wheel and open-ground firing, is among the most primitive pottery methods still alive, regarded as a living fossil of Neolithic ceramics. In 2006 it was declared by the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture and entered the first national ICH list (item Ⅷ-5).

Potters work a clay-and-sand body, coiling it on a slow wheel, beating the surface with patterned wooden paddles to leave impressed marks, then firing it in an open heap of wood; the craft survives in Dai villages such as Mandou in Jinghong, Manluanzhan in Menghan and Manzha in Menghai.

Dai slow-wheel pottery preserves an early, primitive stage of human ceramics, of exceptional value for the study of pottery's origins and early handicraft, and remains a source of everyday vessels in Dai life.

The pottery craft can be seen and tried at places such as the Xishuangbanna Dai Park.