Old lady achieves her dream in porcelain capital
Print Edition
IT is never too late to chase your dreams — just ask Yu Ermei, 86.
Yu, who is from eastern China’s famed ceramics capital Jingdezhen, has spent the past six years working on what she proudly dubs “a porcelain palace.”
Located in Xinping Village in Jingdezhen, the palace is a dazzling three-story circular building.
The ground floor and outer wall are covered in bright shiny mosaic patterns firmly nodding to Chinese culture — a dragon, a phoenix, signs of the Chinese zodiac and Tai Chi symbols, — created with massive quantities of jagged pieces of broken porcelain.
Inside, the effect is magical: windows formed in the shape of a porcelain vase, ceilings decorated with delicate porcelain bowls, shimmering walls embedded with porcelain pieces, and paintings showing classic Chinese folk stories. It is a building of breathtaking beauty.
Around 80 tons of broken porcelain were used in the palace’s building and decoration — mostly collected by Yu over about 30 years.
Why take all the trouble building a porcelain palace when you can enjoy a relaxing old age? But for Yu, the palace is a meaningful way to wrap up her lifetime career as a porcelain craftswoman and dealer — a gift for Jingdezhen, the holy city in the heart of porcelain lovers.
Coming to Jingdezhen aged 12, Yu was first an apprentice in a porcelain workshop before working in two state-run porcelain factories.
She later opened her own kiln and porcelain factory, making and selling porcelain products and objets d’art for China and abroad.
Over the years, she made a fortune and collected more than 60,000 pieces of porcelain. She was not sure what to do with her huge collection until she saw a porcelain house in northern China’s Tianjin City. It inspired her to create her own porcelain palace.
“Jingdezhen is well known as China’s porcelain capital, but there was not a palace in the capital. I wanted to build one here and leave something in the history of the city,” she said. The palace also serves as a museum for Yu to exhibit her personal collection.
She started in 2010, aged 80. She not only designed the palace, but even moved into a small house near the construction site, living there for five years to oversee the building process.
She used almost all her savings, about 7 million yuan (US$1 million) and even had to sell her jewelry and some of her precious porcelain artworks to fund the project. But she has no regrets.
“Time waits for no one. I fear that when I pass away, no one will finish this. Completing the palace and seeing that my precious porcelain collection has a place is a dream comes true,” Yu said.
Now the palace is complete and is open to the public for an admission fee of 25 yuan. A second palace is also under construction nearby.
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