Arita Porcelain Park

Arita Porcelain Park stands at Arita in Saga Prefecture, the town where porcelain was first made in Japan and from which it was shipped to Europe. The park opened in 1993, put up by the porcelain firm Koransha together with local businesses and residents, and its name means simply a park of porcelain.

The building at the centre of the park is a copy of the Zwinger in Dresden, the German baroque palace of the early eighteenth century.

The choice is not arbitrary. Arita porcelain reached the courts of Europe from the seventeenth century onward and was collected there, and Dresden was where Augustus the Strong kept his collection and where Europeans worked out how to make porcelain themselves. A formal garden in the baroque manner is laid out behind the palace.

Beyond the pottery workshop, on the slope of a low hill, stands a climbing kiln. It is a reconstruction of the old Tengudani kiln, where the potter Yi Sam-pyeong is said to have first fired porcelain at Arita about four hundred years ago.

The workshop takes visitors for painting, hand building and work at the wheel, with staff helping those who have not thrown before. Nearby a ceramic mural reproduces an old painted dish showing the trades of the Arita kilns in ten scenes, with the tools and the workshops of the time.