Sancai Glaze Painting

Painting with Glaze

Everything else on this site is an object — a figure, a vessel, a lantern, an inkstone — with a shape of its own. A glaze panel is flat, and what it carries is a picture.

The colour in it is not paint. Paint sits on a ground and stays where the brush leaves it. Glaze is ground mineral held in water, laid onto fired clay and melted, so that it does not rest on the surface but becomes it — no paint layer to scratch away, because the image is in the clay and the image is glass.

The name takes explaining. 三彩, sancai, means "three colours," and the figure is not a count: the palette runs through yellow, blue, green, white, black and red, and the term is the old Chinese way of saying several. What holds the ware together is not how many colours there are but how they behave — the trade sums up the finished surface in five words, 艳、亮、透、流、融: brilliant, glossy, translucent, flowing, fused.

Lines First, Then Glaze

A panel is fired twice. Clay is rolled flat and fired once with no glaze, until the body is hard and porous enough to drink the glaze without collapsing under it. The next stage is the one the craft is named for: a raised line is trailed across the surface, and the glaze goes inside the compartments it makes.

The line is a dam. The colours answer to heat differently — copper to green, iron to amber, cobalt to blue — and each runs or holds or deepens on its own terms. Left loose on a flat slab they would bleed together and the picture would go to mud. The line decides where each colour is allowed to be.

Inside its compartment, though, the glaze is not obedient. It gathers where the slab dips and thins where it rises, and the second firing — long enough for the glaze to melt and fuse — settles the depth of every tone. So the panel is drawn twice: once by hand, in line, and once by heat, in the kiln. The second drawing is never the same twice.

Neither half of the technique is new. The raised line comes down from fahua sancai, a Ming ware built the same way — a line trailed on, colour pooled inside it; the palette from Han and Tang sancai. What is modern is the flat panel: the same materials and the same logic, put to a surface meant to hang.

Two approaches come out of that. 工笔三彩, gongbi sancai, works in fine line and controlled colour, closer to a painting; 写意三彩, xieyi sancai, lets the glaze run further and reads the result as a mood or a landscape. Both are still made.

A City Passes a Law for a Craft

On 1 October 2025, a local statute came into force in Luoyang: the Luoyang Sancai Protection and Development Regulations, six chapters and thirty-seven articles, devoted to a single ceramic tradition.

The process took about a year: work began at the end of 2024, the city's standing committee passed the draft on 6 May 2025, the provincial committee approved it on 29 May, and the full text was published that July. A press conference followed in September, a week before it took effect.

The reason given for it was blunt. The craft faces "an incomplete transmission system, a small, scattered and weak industry, insufficient capacity for innovation, and a shortage of both talent and funding" — problems that call for systematic protection and support.

Article 3 fixes a legal definition: Luoyang sancai is multi-coloured glazed ceramic fired in the Luoyang region from clay and glaze, using yellow, blue, green, white, black and red and other basic glazes; it names sculpture, glaze painting and environmental artwork as part of the tradition, together with related cultural heritage and other cultural forms.

The articles that follow cover a register of protected elements, the duties of city departments, support for research and development, production standards, geographical indication and trademark protection, intellectual property, and earmarked funds for research platforms and training. A city writes a law for something when it expects it to still be there in fifty years.

A Craft the City Embraces

The expectation is already visible in the city's public buildings.

The Sui-Tang Grand Canal Cultural Museum carries a sancai ceiling — 《云帆》, "Cloud Sails" — 9,999 square metres of it, set from 126,986 glazed ceramic units. The Henan pavilion at Expo 2010 Shanghai carried a sancai wall panel 25.85 metres by 3.32 metres. And in September 2025 the Luoyang Museum opened an exhibition of Luoyang sancai artwork.

Every one is a public building. The panels are not behind glass in a case; they are the ceiling and the wall of a room people walk through — a different kind of survival from the one a museum shelf offers, and for a craft built around flat surfaces, the use it was waiting for.

A Modern Panel for a Modern Wall

A panel solves a problem the other lines do not. A figure needs a shelf and a vessel needs a table; a glaze panel needs a wall, and modern buildings have a great deal of wall. Because the colour is fired into the clay rather than applied to it, the surface holds up where a painting would not — in sun, in a lobby, across a whole elevation.

Size is a specification, not a constraint: the same method scales from a panel above a desk to a ceiling. What does not scale is the certainty. The line is drawn once, and after that the kiln has its say.

The panels we carry are listed, with their sizes, on our sancai glaze painting page.