By the time you read this, my name may be written on the side of a house somewhere in Gansu province.

As part of my travel from Xinjiang to Tibet I passed through Gansu province, stopping at the oasis city of Dunhuang. I had caught an overnight train from Wulumuqi in Xinjaing and had heard that Dunhuang was a nice place to spend a while, so I checked into a dodgey dormitory for a few nights. I say dodgy, but you do get what you pay for. I paid around $4 AUS per night. For that I got a bed in a room with 4 other beds and a squat toilet in the hall. They were kind enough to throw in a coating of old plaster every day (fallen from the roof to the bed) and as much black Chinese hair as I could find in my bedsheets. I decided to sleep in my sleeping bag.

There were 2 other people in the room with me, a Swedish dude named Chris who had just turned 18 and finished school and a Japanese dude who had been travelling for 8 years. They were both pretty cool, Chris and I happened to be both planning the same route to Tibet, so we travelled for a while together, he was actually with me up at Namtso when I got altitude sickness.

Anyway, one of the days we were in Dunhuang Chris and I hired bicycles and set of for the Mogao caves. It is 20km out of town, and in the first kilometer or so my tire became flat. This meant that every time the tire rotated onto the valve, it jolted the bike enough that the bell rang. This combined with the old rusty nature of the bike meant that the soundtrack to this particular ride was something like "thud scrape DING! thud scrape DING! thud scrape DING!"

After about half an hour of riding we realised that there was no way we were going to make it to the caves before they were due to shut, so we turned randomly off the path and road along a dirt track.

We stopped our bikes by a cotton field and were standing by when I saw a family in a field that were looking at us. I waved, they waved back, so I decided to go say hello. They seemed thrilled that a laowai had broken up the monotony of bending down to pick cotton, so I stayed a while and helped them. Below is a photo of a woman showing me how to remove the pluck the cotton from the stem.

Passing back along the highway to Dunghuang, I noticed a what looked to be a brick works to one side. Given my experience getting down and dirty with the locals I thought I would wander in.

The only westerners these people would have seen would be rapidly passing them by on a coach to the local tourist attractions, so we were quite a scene. It seemed that I could go pretty much anywhere in the place. I walked around the joint and sized up the brick making operation.

First a bulldozer type thing pushes a big pile of dirt towards the machinery. The picture above is of the guys keeping an eye on said machinery. The bulldozer is located behind the dirt piles seen in the background. There is a hole somewhere underneath and a conveyor belt carries crushed dirt out. This dirt is mixed with a percentage of charcoal and moistened. It is then fed into a machine that extrudes it and presses it through an array of wires, to cut it into bricks. Please see below.

The wire cut bricks are taken by cart to a drying rack. The people who were working the machines and working the carts were typical young Chinese. Below is a short video I took of the process.

You can see the boards that are taken from the stack on the right hand side of the video. The bricks are extruded onto them and then they are carried to a cart. The cart, when full, is wheeled off to be unloaded in the drying saw. Men, women and children were stacking wet bricks in piles like the one below.

The wet bricks seemed to just sit in a stack. I walked around the entire ground and checked everything out, Seemed like a stack of wet mud bricks turning to dry mud bricks. Even the driest of the bricks were pretty damn average in my opinion, and I was wondering why they were bothering. I only say this as I picked up a brick and tested its strength (against another hard object, yes...) and it smashed very easily. The bricks only seemed as strong as dry mud.

After destroying and defacing (see the picture at the top of this article) a few bricks, we waved goodbye and walked back to our bikes. Before you get all sanctimonious on me, there were many many piles of discarded reject bricks smashed all over the place.

When we were up on the highway again, I could see that the brick works continued across the other side of the road. There was a tunnel. By watching, I could see people load up the dry weak bricks (I am sure there is a pottery term applicable here... perhaps green?) and take them through to the side with the kiln.

I couldn't resist seeing how the rest of the process worked. We walked down to the kiln side of the brick works. The bricks seemed to be wheeled into a queue, then moved from the queue to a massive kiln like structure with smoke coming from it. Below is a cart man who has just left the kiln.

A woman from an office looking structure came out and stared at us meaningfully while we were near this side of the kiln. She looked at me meaningfully, as if thinking about what action the management should take. I looked at her, waved my hand and shouted hello (Ni Hao) in Chinese. She walked back inside her demountable style office and closed the door. End of issue...

I took the apparent freedom of whiteys to walk around the entire operation. Whenever someone would look at me in surprise I would wave and shout 'Ni Hao!' and they would smile. I didn't think anyone would stop me, so me and Chris walked into the brick kiln. It was reasonably warm inside, but not as hot as I thought it would have been. There were portholes in the walls, and a team of workers stacking at one end, and unstacking at the other. I thought we were between firings. I walked up to the workers stacking wet bricks into the corner, see below.

The workers as you can see, were surprised at seeing us. But not surprised enough to stop working. All the jobs in this entire place looked like they would suck, unless you enjoy doing the same 3-6 second operation over and over all day. I walked out of the kiln and climbed up a bamboo ladder onto its roof. I was very surprised that someone didn't stop me, as the office woman from before had come out and was watching me. The man below was watching many all smoke orifices in the roof of the kiln.

One thing I don't understand about the layout is, where was the fire? I was inside the kiln and it was no more than 70 degrees, which was far less than the temperature of the smoke coming from the holes in the roof. I touched one of those holes in the roof you see above, and believe me it was scolding. There was no way I could have lifted one of those metal plugs.

Anyway, the finished bricks seemed just as hard as western ones. They were a little rough round the edges at times, but given how they are made that can be forgiven. It was quite interesting to see what looked like ordinary dirt turn into a finished, fired brick.