As one of the two oldest pottery villages in Southeast Asia, Bau Truc is considered a “museum” of traditional pottery of Cham people.

Bau Truc village is located some 10km south of Phan Rang City in the central province of Ninh Thuan.

The village is home to around 400 families, of which 85 percent are in the traditional pottery business. The business is said to be handed down from Po Klong Chanh, one of their ancestors from ancient times. Every year, local people hold days of worship and festivals to commemorate Chanh.

People in Bau Truc use their skillful hands, bamboo - made circles and shells to create pottery works. In other pottery villages, craftsmen have switched to using wheel as an indispensable tool, their Cham counterparts still rely on talented hands and rudimentary tools.

To create a pottery product, a Cham craftsman only needs an anvil, not a potter’s wheel, and other rudimentary tools and molds and then uses hands shape pieces of clay into the work he wants. With skillful manipulations and extraordinary masterpiece comes into being.

Pottery made in Bau Truc has a variety such as cooking - pots, cauldrons, water jars and many others. Vases and pots have been the village’s list of products recently to meet the demands of floriculturists.

The material that plays an important role in creating real made-in-Bau Truc pottery is special clay. The clay is taken from the banks of the Quao River and is very flexible and durable when fired.

The techniques of mixing sand with the clay are also variant. The amount of sand mixed with the plastic material is dependent on what the pottery used for and the sizes. For these reasons, Bau Truc pottery is quite different from pottery elsewhere. For example, water jars made in Bau Truc are always favored by people in dry and sunny areas because the temperature of the water in the jars is always centigrade cooler than that outside.

A visit to Bau Truc village in photos:

Anh Le