page_title: Chen Clan Ancestral Hall
section_title: Pottery
hierarchical_section_title: Chen Clan Ancestral Hall / Art works / Pottery
caption_attribution_description: English: Pottery on the ridge
context_page_description: The Chen Clan Ancestral Hall or Chen Clan Academy is an academic temple in Guangzhou, China, built by the 72 Chen clans for their juniors' accommodation and preparation for the imperial examinations in 1894 in Qing Dynasty. Later it was changed to be the Chen Clan's Industry College, and then middle schools afterward. Now it houses the Guangdong Folk Art Museum.
  Located at Zhongshan 7th Road, the Chen Clan Ancestral Hall is a symmetric complex consist of 19 buildings with nine halls and six courtyards. Facing south, the complex forms around a north-south axis. A large collection of southern China art pieces, for example, wood carvings and pottery, can be found in the structure. The Chen Clan Ancestral Hall complex exemplifies traditional Chinese architecture and decoration style, and has influenced cultural and architectural developments worldwide. It was added in the list of "Cultural Relics of National Importance under the Protection of the State" in 1988.
context_section_description: One of the most distinguished features of the Chen Clan Ancestral Hall is the 11 pottery ridge crest, which was installed on the nine great halls of the academy. Each ridge crest has a theme taken from famous traditional dramas. Some are figures of characters in a play, some have series of more than ten scenes in a drama. With summering and exaggerating, the pottery ridge crests show the featured drama scene in comic series. The pottery ridge crest on the roof of the Gathering Hall has the largest scale and most delicate manufacture among all. This ridge crest spans 27 meters, 2.9 meters in height, 4.26 meters high with the plaster base and contains a total of 224 figures. The scenes in this ridge crest are "Celebrating the birth of gods", "Qilin giving people offspring", "The bearded man and Li Jing" and some others. Along with the figures are patterns of Yutang birds and peony, which represent wealth and glamour, and shapes of melons and fruits, which represent flourish of offspring. Moreover, the tip of the ridge crests are flying cods, which were believed to be a half-dragon half-fish creature. These flying cod figures have tentacles reaching out from the roof to the sky, which make the profile of the building more elegant.
caption: Pottery on the ridge
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2010:12:07 02:29:25", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "7287", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1197", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "905"}