Walking through the narrow lanes of Lukang's old quarter, you notice them before anything else — rows of hand-painted majolica tiles embedded into courtyard facades, their emerald glazes catching the low winter sun. Peonies in full bloom. Phoenixes mid-flight. Most visitors treat these century-old panels as quaint backdrop. Few realize that within a decade, half may be gone.
A Porcelain Archive, Disappearing
The tiles arrived between the 1870s and 1930s, imported from Britain and later from Japanese factories in Awaji and Danto. Merchant families in Lukang, Daxi, and Sanxia set them into courtyard facades as status markers — each panel a self-contained painting in whitewashed cement. When Hsu Chia-rong began cataloguing them in the 2000s, forty percent had been lost to renovation.
Every tile that falls is a painting that will never be made again. These are not reproductions — each one is a singular work embedded in architecture.
— Hsu Chia-rong, tile historian