"We spent Wednesday traveling to the Great Wall at MuJian Yu, a trip of about two hours. Enroute we visited a factory that produces beautiful vases. It was situated in an old square Chinese community home with the individual rooms opening onto a central court yard. The doors to the rooms were covered with old heavy blankets and inside was a scene that probably hasn't changed for centuries. There were women hunched over tables creating copper vases. They then glued thin metal wiring onto the copper vase in intricate designs. When this design was secured, other workers used an eyedropper and sucked up colored enamel into the dropper and then squeezed it out into the various areas enclosed by the wires to form beautiful designs. In the next room was the firing of the vases that was done for about five minutes in 1000 degree ovens and then a man sitting at a rotating wheel polished the vase before it returned to the women artists who would add the colored enamel again. The process would be repeated 10 times since each time the vase was fired the enamel would shrink a little. By the time the vase had gone through this process 10 times it was a truly beautiful work of art.
Following this tour we were ushered into a very modern show room and we looked over the finished products. Even the smallest vases were $30-$40 dollars and some were in the thousands of dollars. It was interesting to me that the workers were working in such deplorable conditions and yet the show room was nice, warm, and modern. It's hard to understand why the owners of the business don't upgrade the working facilities. Maybe they wanted us to pity the workers and that way we would buy more. I don't know but in America we wouldn't tolerate such conditions. Many things that I saw throughout our touring puzzled me."
