Today would be a big day ... our visit to the Great Wall of China where Anne and I would finally realize our dream of walking on the Great Wall. We could hardly wait the anticipation was so great. Unfortunately the day would not turn out to be one of the better ones.

Since we arrived in Beijing on Wednesday afternoon (it's now Saturday morning) we'd not seen a glimpse of the Sun. The weather was gray and overcast, but not raining thank goodness, and the temperature was hovering around the 60 degree mark making the days comfortable. And there was always that haze in the sky obscuring your distant views. When Anne and I awoke the first thing we did was look out the window to see what kind of day it was. It was immediately apparent that the weather had further deteriorated. It was cloudier, colder and, unfortunately, a bit of a drizzle in the air. We were disappointed, but we still looked forward to walking on the Great Wall no matter how bad the weather was.

We were originally scheduled to visit the Great Wall at Ba Da Ling and, on the return trip, we would stop and visit the Ming Tombs and a cloisonné factory. As the bus progressed toward the Great Wall the weather did not improve so our tour escort decided to rearrange the order of our day to give the weather a chance to improve. Our first stop would be the cloisonné factory.

I should mention before going further that this was another example of a "good thing" or "bad thing" byproduct of taking an escorted tour. The tour organizers always make arrangements for the tour buses to stop at local factories where articles can be purchased. If you're taking a tour you have no choice but to make the stop whether you're interested or not. If you're not on a tour you'd miss these little stops and probably save a lot of money. I actually found them to be very interesting.

I know you've all seen examples of Chinese cloisonné in the stores at home. But have you ever thought about how it was made? I never did, and I was thoroughly surprised observing the process at this factory. I had no idea of what was involved.

My first surprise was to learn that the articles actually have a metal base to them. In the photo (left) a worker is gluing very small metal forms onto the plate base. These small metal forms form the patterns of the pictures that appear on the vase.

Once the small metal pattern forms are glued into place the workers fill the spaces with a selected color from a series of powders mixed with water.

After filling the pattern forms with the various colors the articles are then smoothed by hand. This part was a bit confusing as the powdered colors were mixed with water and, therefore, water soluble, and this process depended on water to smooth the article as it rotated at high speed. I would have thought the colors would have just dissolved, but they didn't.

The next and final step in the process was the firing of the articles in the kiln, and then it was onto the showroom floor for all of us to marvel at and, of course, purchase.

We had hoped the weather would improve while we spent our time and money at the cloisonné factory, but that was not to be. It was still very gray and overcast, but the drizzle that was coming down when we boarded the bus at the hotel had stopped. Mei decided to delay our arrival at the Great Wall even more and scheduled our next stop to be the Ming Tombs located not to far from the Great Wall.

Continue to the next page to see the photographs of the Ming Tombs ...