The Ming Dynasty Zhou Gaoqi's "Yang Envy Tea Pot System" has such a mythical description of the state of the Huanglongshan pottery mine: "The excavation of the mountains and their caves is often produced here by good disciples, and suddenly he gets them from the caves, and the spirit of the real mountain has a sizhi, but they all go deep into dozens of zhangs." ”
Translated into the vernacular, the purple sand ore found here often breaks its vein after digging this groove, but suddenly the same variety of purple sand ore can be seen elsewhere. The ancients could not understand this phenomenon, believing that it was because of the control of the mountain god. In fact, it is the tectonic movement of the Huanglongshan vein, that is, the same layer of large-area veins, due to the movement of the earth's crust, causing some places to rise, some places to fall, forming a fault, so there will be different areas to find the same kind of clay ore.
The entire Huanglong Mountain has a circumference of 2.5 kilometers, with a maximum elevation of 200 meters and a minimum of 80 meters. All the pottery ore varieties stored in Huanglong mountain are composed of silicon, aluminum, iron, manganese, sodium, calcium, titanium, potassium, quartzite, mica, phosphate rock, carbonate rock and other minerals.
According to the statistics of Yixing Ceramics Company's survey report on the reserve resources of Huanglongshan in the 20th century, the total reserves of Huanglongshan pottery ore are 27 million tons, and the best purple sand mud accounts for only 3% of them. With the in-depth development of Huanglongshan and the continuous improvement of kiln temperature facilities, new varieties of purple sand pottery ore have been discovered, which has broken the original standard of purple sand ore reserves, as for what new purple sand categories are later, I will explain them one by one in the following pictures.
More than 7,000 years ago, the people of Yixing relied on the rich pottery resources in Yixing area to start the handicraft of primitive daily pottery, and then in the long-term development of manual production, gradually experimented with the pottery stored in each mountain range to burn daily pottery. From making bricks and tiles from clay from the surface of the mountains to finding tender clay terracotta, some simple living utensils are produced. This kind of shallow surface clay, firing temperature is low, suitable for primitive society to make simple daily pottery. Until the Qin and Han Dynasties, people in many hilly mountains in Yixing, mined a large amount of high-temperature clay clay - jia mud.
The birth of purple sand art and the discovery of purple sand material are inseparable from the nail mud, because the precious purple sand ore is subdivided in the nail mud layer, which is why the purple sand mud is called "mud in the mud".
The stone contains pottery ore, and the mine contains purple sand.
A mud, commonly known as mud, tank mud, it is the largest reserve of pottery ore varieties in Yixing, but also the largest amount of stoneware materials, used to be the raw material for the cylinder, and now often used to make tea pots and even pots.
Its texture is as hard as stone, sand and crispness are large, the grain is rich, the plasticity is very strong, and the iron content is also very high. Kaolin, quartz, mica and other minerals are rich in content, and after firing, they become purple and purple-brown. After the nail mud is formed into pottery, the fetal bone is hard, the breathability is good, and the sand is full. A mud will be combined with tender mud, according to the proportion of the production of mature mud, can make a variety of large and small pots and urns, is Yixing Dingshu ceramic enterprises to produce daily pottery, industrial pottery, uniform pottery, pottery, faience pottery and other ceramic processes of the main raw materials for ceramic technology.
In the past, a large number of practical pottery, especially large cylinders, were made of fragrant mountain mud and nail mud in proportion, in order to prevent water leakage and from aesthetic point of view, the surface of the large cylinder will often be glazed with water, and more advanced will also pile dragons and phoenixes on the surface of the cylinder.
When I was a child, every household in Jiangnan would have at least such a large tank, and when the tap water was not yet available, the main function of the large tank was used to store water, and after the water was filled, some alum would be put in for disinfection and filtration. Others will take large vats for pickles, layers of cabbage and layers of salt, stacked stacks, and finally covered with plastic film and pressed with large stones.
Nowadays, the large tanks are almost invisible, and are occasionally seen in some places, used as decoration or used to raise ornamental fish and plant lotus leaves.
Crooked topic, back to the nail mud, there are many varieties of nail mud, due to the difference between the mining area and the ore layer, it can also be divided into old nails and young nails. Among them, the nail mud of Yixing Huanglong Mountain is the best, known as Benshan Jia Mud, the Jia Mud mined in the Xishan Mining Area, called the Xishan Jia Mud, and the Jia Mud mined in the Runzhong Mining Area, called the Dongshan Jia Mud.
Although the beetle mud and purple sand mud produced by HuanglongShan belong to the pottery mine, the purple sand pottery texture is delicate and warm, stale and measured, and the sintered carcass is dignified as grease and warm as jade. After the nail mud is fired, the tread surface is rough, the color is dull, there is no oil feeling, and the texture is also very rough, so it was basically not used to make a pot in the past.
Now, with the improvement and improvement of the purple sand kiln mouth facilities, the temperature of the pottery and the atmosphere in the kiln can be precisely controlled. For example, now the Huanglong Mountain's black mounds, black mud, hemp mud, etc., under the ultra-high temperature to burn out the wonderful colors that have never been seen before, some are tiger skin color, some are rust red, these brilliant colors are favored by modern players, and because it is a special high temperature fired out of the pot, the practical function of making tea is more than the general purple sand mud, and the tea soup is more warm and pure.
The disorderly mining of Huanglongshan in the past few decades has caused a waste of many purple sand resources. Now we have to know how to make reasonable use of each kind of mineral material, for example, in the past, people did not recognize the use value of hemp sub-beetle mud material, and today through the development of high-temperature facilities, the utilization of purple sand clay has been greatly improved.
The process of purple sand mud, like the art of purple sand production, with the continuous promotion and research of the personnel in the mud refining industry, continues to develop and progress, hoping that the mud refining industry can go to the wu cunjing and bring more and better high-quality purple sand mud to the pot friends.
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