The jar sits on the counter of a workshop in Quarter 7, dark red going to charcoal along one shoulder, its surface too rough for a bowl and too fired to still be earth. No handle. No glaze. When I lift it, the walls are colder than the room around them, and lighter than the size suggests—as if the clay had learned, somewhere in its firing, exactly how much water it needed to hold and let the rest of the weight go.
Run a thumb around the belly and you find them: shallow ridges, circling the jar at intervals that are close but never quite equal. There is no repeating motif here, no stamped or carved pattern that asserts itself as decoration. One ridge sits a hand’s width from the next, then a little more, then a little less, the way a person’s stride shortens on ground that isn’t flat.
I ask the young man minding the shop what made them. He shrugs—some tool, maybe, or the way the clay dried on one side before the other. He doesn’t think it worth explaining to someone holding a water jar for the first time.
I keep touching the ridges anyway. Something about their unevenness reads less like error than like a record of movement I haven’t yet been shown how to follow—a set of increments that mean nothing to me and, I suspect, meant something exact to whoever’s hands passed over this clay while it was still wet.
This is Bàu Trúc Cham pottery—water jars, cooking pots, and increasingly, ornaments—made in a village of the same name in Ninh Thuận province, on Vietnam’s south-central coast. No wheel touches this clay. No mold shapes it. The forming happens by hand, around a mound that never moves, in a technique local artisans call *tay quay, mông xoay*—hands turn, hips rotate.
The Cart Path
The village sits in Quarter 7 of Phước Dân town, Ninh Phước district, about ten kilometers south of Phan Rang – Tháp Chàm along National Route 1A—close enough to the highway that trucks pass within earshot of courtyards where nothing has been mechanized in living memory. The workshops aren’t factories. They’re family yards, open to the sky, a low wooden pedestal set near the house wall.
The clay itself comes from the banks of the Quao River, four or five kilometers off by cart track, and every year, artisans say, a little farther—the river corridor is now protected, and the fields around it are contested by other claims, so the ground that can still be dug keeps shrinking toward the water’s edge. What arrives in the courtyard has already been pounded, dried, filtered of stone and root, soaked overnight, then worked into a specific blend with fine sand pulled from a streambed. The ratio is a family’s own, adjusted by what the clay is meant to become—a jar needs a different mix than a teapot—and it was never written down, because no one expected it would have to travel outside a household to be useful.
In the yard, an older woman steps backward around the pedestal in short, deliberate paces, while a man near the gate splits firewood for the fire that will come days later. Local memory credits a court official, Poklong Chanh, who is said to have given up his position under the Cham king Po Klong Garai to come teach the village’s women how to find this clay and shape it—the reason still offered for why the knowledge sits with women rather than men. But the man at the gate makes something else clear: the arrangement was never about who does the labor. It’s about who does the part that leaves a signature.
The village’s own name carries at least three different tellings in the accounts I’ve read, none of them agreeing on what the older Cham words meant before they were folded into “Bàu Trúc.” I’ve stopped trying to settle which is right. A place can go on being real without anyone agreeing on how it got its name.
Tay Quay, Mông Xoay
Holding the jar that first morning, I took its uneven rings for the mark of a technique still reaching for a precision that a wheel gives for free. Watching the woman work changed the reading.
She doesn’t turn the clay. She turns around it. The mound stays fixed on its pedestal while she circles backward in narrowing steps, hands doing the pressing, pulling, and smoothing that a spinning wheel would otherwise perform by bringing the material to a still pair of hands. Here the hands stay still relative to nothing; the whole body is the moving part. Every wheel that has ever thrown a pot has done one job—hold the material steady against the hands while something rotates. In Bàu Trúc, the rotating part just happens to be a person, and a person’s steps are never quite identical twice. The ridges on my jar are the precise record of one particular walk.
Decoration comes after the shape holds, applied with what’s on hand rather than what’s specialized: a wooden stick, a loop of bamboo, a shell edge, a fingernail, a twist of wet cloth, pressed in as she continues to circle—wave lines, a leaf motif, a run of cross-hatching, none of it needing a separate pass once the shaping stops. The pot dries in shade first, then sun, until the water is fully out of it. Nothing about this stage asks for machinery. It asks for a body that knows how many steps a particular size of vessel takes, the way a hand knows a familiar staircase in the dark.
What Still Turns
The households that still hold this knowledge in some working form number in the several hundreds, organized loosely around a cooperative—a few dozen families who fire and sell together, one thread of a much larger fabric of part-time and full-time practice across the village. Almost no one lives on pottery alone; it sits alongside farming, a few animals, or wage work elsewhere, the income from clay filling in rather than carrying a household by itself.
The firing hasn’t changed. There’s no permanent kiln—the pieces are stacked with firewood between them, covered in rice husk and dry straw, and burned in the open for five to twelve hours at temperatures between 600 and 900 degrees, depending on the wood and the wind that day. When the fire dies and the clay is still almost too hot to touch, someone splashes or sprays it with a dark plant extract—water steeped from cashew husks, or a resin drawn from a forest tree—and the surface answers with what’s called *hỏa biến*, fire-change: brick red shading into ash gray, a patch of dark yellow going to black, no two pieces landing the same way twice.
In November 2022, UNESCO placed the Art of Pottery-making of the Cham People on its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding—Vietnam’s fifteenth listing of its kind. A national plan running through 2026 aims to protect what’s left of the clay corridor along the Quao, train a next generation through school programs and workshops led by the oldest artisans, and help households reach buyers without losing so much to the middlemen who currently stand between a cart of clay and a finished sale. It’s an odd thing, watching a woman circle a pedestal on a Tuesday afternoon, to know that what she’s doing has also been formally declared urgent. The practice doesn’t feel endangered from inside a courtyard. It feels like Tuesday.
From the Kitchen to the Shelf
For most of this village’s history, what came off these pedestals was meant to be used, not looked at: rice pots, soup pots, water jars like the one I keep returning to, fish troughs, jars for storing grain—vessels valued because their walls, never glazed, stay porous enough to keep water cool and food a little fresher without anything electric involved. Aluminum, then stainless steel, then plastic, undercut all of it on price and on durability, and a household that once needed six or seven different Bàu Trúc shapes now often needs none.
What’s replaced them on the workshop shelves are Apsara dancers, miniature Cham towers, art vases, hand-built teapots, reliefs carved with temple motifs—objects bought once and never asked to hold water, survive a boil, or keep anything cool. The same clay, walked around by the same feet, in the same “tay quay, mông xoay”, is increasingly shaped toward being seen rather than used. The skill itself remains intact. What has shifted is the question the object is asked to answer: no longer how well it holds water, but how well it photographs on a shelf.
The pressures around this change are not gentle. The young leave for city and industrial-zone work more readily than they take up a pedestal, and the artisans who remain skew older every year. The clay keeps retreating from the village as land use tightens around the river. Smoke from an open firing, once unremarkable in an agricultural hamlet, now sits less comfortably next to neighbors as the village fills in. I don’t know whether the right word for all of this is decline or adaptation, and I’m wary of anyone—myself included—who claims to know which word fits, based on one afternoon of watching from outside it.
Getting There
The detour off Route 1A is short enough that it doesn’t need its own day—ten kilometers south of Phan Rang – Tháp Chàm, into Quarter 7. Families who don’t dig their own clay now buy it through a middleman for close to 300,000 dong a cart, with sand costing about the same, since fewer households make the trip to the riverbank themselves. Firings don’t run on a printed schedule; they wait on dry weather, and once lit will hold a courtyard for anywhere from five to twelve hours, so anyone hoping to see one is better off asking a day ahead than arriving and expecting fire. Workshops welcome visitors willing to try the backward walk themselves, however unevenly it goes, and the village sits close enough to Mỹ Nghiệp’s brocade looms, and to the Ginang drums and Saranai horns played at Katê, that a single afternoon here tends to stretch into most of a day without anyone planning it that way.
In the front room, a couple buys an Apsara dancer small enough to fit in a jacket pocket and asks the young man if it’s hand-painted. He says something about the fire doing the color, and they nod without quite hearing it, already looking toward the next shelf. I think about the jar behind them, still sitting where I left it on the counter, waiting for someone else’s thumb to find the ridges and wonder, the way I did, what exactly walked here before they arrived.
August 2026
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