A morning at Bat Trang

By seven in the morning, Mrs Thuy has already loaded the kiln. She does it without hurry, passing each bowl hand to hand along the line of her family, the way her mother did on the same patch of floor. Behind her the Red River flows brown and slow beyond the dyke. In an hour the first tour bus will pull into the village, and the workshop that has made rice bowls and flower vases for three generations will turn, for a few hours, into a classroom.

Bat Trang has been making ceramics for several centuries, and its clay, glazes and blue-and-white patterns are known across Vietnam. For most of that time the village sold to traders. Today much of its income comes through the front door. Visitors pay to spin a lump of clay on a wheel, paint a plate and take it home, and Mrs Thuy admits the classes now bring in more than some of her wholesale orders. "A tourist will happily pay for an afternoon," she says. "A shop owner will argue over every thousand dong."

Success has brought its own quarrel. Walk the lanes and you will find shelves of identical teapots, many cast in moulds, a few brought in from factories elsewhere and finished with a Bat Trang stamp. Mrs Thuy does not hide her irritation. She throws her best pieces by hand, and each takes her a morning. "People see two bowls on a table and ask why one costs three times as much," she says. "I cannot explain it in one minute, so I invite them to try it for themselves." Her classes, she suggests, are partly a way of teaching customers to tell the difference.

Her daughter, Lan, who studied design in Hanoi, has different worries. She wants to experiment with glazes that fade from grey to a deep green, and she sells small runs of cups online to buyers in other countries. Her mother doubts that foreigners will care for them, though she watched the orders arrive. The kiln is a point of friction too. Wood gave way to gas long ago, partly to cut smoke in the village, and Lan would like to buy an electric one for test firings. "Every new thing costs money and we have no savings," says her mother. "Every old thing is dying," replies Lan.

By noon the visitors have gone, and the workshop is quiet again except for the tick of the cooling kiln. Mrs Thuy opens the door a crack and a small wave of heat rolls out. Inside, the bowls have come through the fire without a crack. She lifts one out with a cloth, turns it over, and runs her thumb along the foot. "Good," she says, mostly to herself. Lan, standing a step behind, has been watching her mother's hands, not the bowl.