CULTURAL
Pottery Making / 7 hours
Tour Highlights
- Pottery Making Experience
- Silleuksa Temple
Seoul - Yeoju - Seoul (- - -) 160km
Today, you will try your hands to make ceramic pieces like cups, jars, pendants, or vases under careful guidance of masters. Yeoju has long been the cradle of Korea's high quality porcelain. There is a well established workshop where you can test your own pottery-making skills.
Pottery is made by forming a clay body into objects of a required shape and heating them to high temperatures in a kiln to induce reactions that lead to permanent changes, including increasing their strength and hardening and setting their shape. Prior to some shaping processes, air trapped within the clay body needs to be removed by wedging. Wedging can also help to ensure even moisture content throughout the body. Once a clay body has been de-aired or wedged, it is shaped by a variety of techniques. After shaping it is dried before firing. The potter's most basic tools include the potter's wheel and turntable, shaping tools (paddles, anvils, ribs), rolling tools (roulettes, slab rollers, rolling pins), cutting/piercing tools (knives, fluting tools, wires) and finishing tools (burnishing stones, rasps, chamois). Then you will be able to create your own ceramic piece of art when you get clay and explanation how to use it in order to mold whatever you want.
Most Korean temples were built high in the mountains to avoid worldly noise and trouble. But, Silleuksa from the Silla dynasty (BC 57-AD 935) is a rare temple that is perched on a riverbank amid an attractive waterfront whose cove forms a snug and cosy enclosure for this ancient sanctuary. Many pray at a beautiful seven-tier marble pagoda that is masterfully adorned with dragon and lotus carvings. Incense burning in the temple and sights and smells mixed offer visitors a really magical experience. A 500-year-old aromatic juniper tree and a 600-year-old ginkgo tree grow on the temple grounds and on a small hill stand a seven-story brick pagoda, the only existing Goryeo brick pagoda (918-1392).
