THE INQUIRY

Qinghua Street was purpose-built. Yuxi is a tobacco city, the home of the Hongta Group, one of China’s largest cigarette makers. According to figures published by the Yuxi Municipal Bureau of Statistics in July 2024, tobacco still accounts for 60 to 70 percent of the city’s above-scale industrial output. Its taxes once funded virtually everything. But in 1994, the State Council’s tax-sharing reform redirected tobacco excise revenue to the central government, and by 2001 the Hongta Group’s annual tax contribution had fallen from over 20 billion yuan to roughly 12.7 billion, a drop of more than 30 percent (MBA Library; Sohu News, citing contemporary financial reporting). The city needed something else. In January 2013, Yuxi’s party secretary Zhang Zulin stood up at the provincial People’s Congress and declared that the city would “vigorously develop the modern service sector, led by tourism” (Yuxi Municipal Government, “2013 Year in Review”). That same year, the municipal government released its Cultural Tourism Strategy and the Kun-Yu-Hong Tourism-Culture Industry Belt Action Plan (Yuxi Municipal Government, 2014), and a local kiln successfully refired blue-and-white porcelain (a technical achievement, it turns out, that had already been accomplished privately by a single artisan back in 1992). In 2014, Yuxi blue-and-white porcelain received provincial-level ICH status (Yunnan Gateway, 2020). In 2019, the city broke ground on a 4.5-billion-yuan ceramics art town (Yunnan Daily, 2024; Yuxi Municipal Government, 2024). Qinghua Street, which opened in October 2020, is its commercial centerpiece.

The street is lined with red brick facades, calligraphy banners, and the words “Intangible Heritage” printed on every awning. It was originally pitched as a cultural-creative hub, then drifted into a food street, and has only recently swung back toward heritage branding. At the entrance to Yuqing Kiln, a shelf of Wamao fridge magnets greeted us by the door. Inside: two people shaping clay at long worktables in a brick-walled courtyard. At the back, a half-height kiln.

Yang Ayi, a shop attendant, walked me through the product logic. Stick a miniature Wamao onto a ceramic cup, and the price goes from 60 to 140 yuan. The figures with coins sell best: the green ones, with a big open mouth. If the coin is inside, the back is sealed, so the wealth stays in. No coin means the back is left open, to pull fortune in from outside. I asked about the original meaning of the open mouth, the spirit-swallowing function documented in the ethnographic literature. She did not mention it. Nobody in the shop did.

Zheng Popo is not a Wamao artisan. She is a ceramicist who spent twenty years making glazed roof tiles alongside her husband, Liu Jialiang. Between 2002 and 2013, their main business was tiles and building materials. She had never made a Wamao in her life.

That changed when the city’s cultural-industries push began. Around 2013, a government agency called the Hongta District Cultural Industries Office started connecting workshops to trade fairs and providing promotional channels. Zheng Popo saw an opportunity: Wamao were cheap to make, easy to transport, and increasingly in demand at the fairs. She started producing them, not out of any attachment to the tradition but to keep the workshop running.

Today her operation has a clear division of labor: she molds the clay bodies in bulk, her daughter-in-law paints them, and her son handles the finishing and firing. They produce for wholesale: 200 to 300 pieces at a time, costing 50 to 200 yuan per unit, retailing at roughly double in tourist areas. Walk-in local sales barely exist. In the two days I spent sitting in the shop, almost no one from Yuxi came through the door. The visitors were tourists from out of town, browsing, occasionally picking something up and putting it back.

Around 2017, the Cultural Industries Office was folded into the Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism. Zheng Popo’s account of what changed is sharp: she says the new bureau turned cultural support into a transaction, that awards and market access now go to people with money or connections rather than skilled craftspeople. I have no way to independently verify that claim, and she has known tensions with other workshops in the area, so I present it as what it is: one artisan’s experience of a felt shift in how the system works. But the bitterness in her voice was real, and it came up more than once.

Liu Jialiang, Zheng Popo’s husband, did not want to talk about Wamao. He wanted to talk about the kiln.

He is a man whose life runs on ceramic infrastructure. He started learning to make pottery and mix glazes as a teenager, rose to become technical deputy director of the Yuxi Municipal Kiln Factory, and in 1992, when the Yuxi Dragon Kiln archaeological excavation turned up shards of blue-and-white porcelain, he was the one who figured out how to reproduce the technique. No formula survived; he developed his own glaze composition and firing process from scratch. This was two decades before the city government officially announced the “revival” of Yuxi blue-and-white porcelain as part of its 2013 cultural-tourism push. The revival had already happened, quietly, in one man’s workshop.

In 1993, frustrated by what he called cronyism in the state-run kiln system, Liu left and started his own business. The Yuxi Municipal Kiln Factory was eventually taken over and repurposed. Its former site, on a road still called Ancient Kiln Road, is where Liu chose to set up his current workshop. He moved there on purpose. “The root of Yuxi ceramics is here,” he told me. “You can’t surrender this land to food vendors.”

He does not make Wamao. Blue-and-white porcelain, glaze chemistry, kiln construction: those are his domains. The workshop started producing Wamao only around 2020, because customers kept asking for them. For Liu, they are a side product, not a calling. His energy goes into the infrastructure: he has lobbied the Bureau of Culture and Tourism to waive rent for young artisans who might set up workshops in the area. They turned him down.

There is an irony here that Liu himself does not dwell on but that the project cannot ignore: the man who literally re-created Yuxi’s ceramic heritage from archaeological fragments now occupies a workshop where the bestselling item is a product he considers peripheral, and that product is the one the city calls its “intangible cultural heritage.”

Li Ping’s studio, Wamao Daren, occupies a residential building about ten minutes from the city center. She and her husband Wang Ziqiang studied ceramics together at university. In 2013, still students, they picked the Wamao as their direction, “because it was cute to make, and nobody else was doing it.” After graduating in 2015, they launched the studio. Today it is the largest Wamao brand in Yuxi.

Li Ping is the most clear-eyed person I met about the nature of what she sells. “Wamao was never anything to begin with,” she told me. “As long as you keep the giant open mouth, you can do whatever you want with it.” She said this not as a confession but as a design principle. The absence of a fixed form is, for her, creative freedom.