If you're interested in pottery, or if you simply want to buy a Chinese tea set, head for DINGSHAN , a thirty-minute minibus ride south of Yixing. There may be nothing to see here beyond pots and ceramic artefacts, but it's fascinating to find the products of the pottery factories literally crammed into every nook and cranny. Ceramic lampposts line the road into town, pottery shards crunch under your feet on the main street and the walls of buildings are embedded with broken tiles. It's worth taking a short stroll around just to see the scale of production, and also to visit the Pottery Exhibition Center.

It is an incredible fact that this obscure town has been producing pots since the beginning of recorded history. Primitive unglazed pots have been found here which date back to the Shang and Zhou periods, some three thousand years ago. Since the Han dynasty at least, around 200 BC, this has been the most renowned site for glazed wares in China - Dingshan can take a lot of the credit for our use of the word "china" to mean ceramics. In terms of wealth, Dingshan had its heyday under the Ming from the fourteenth century, but manufacturing is still going strong today, in the town's thirty-some ceramics factories. A sandy local clay is used to produce the purple sand pottery , a dull brown unglazed ware, heavy in iron, whose properties of retaining the colour, fragrance and flavour of tea supposedly make for incomparable teapots. If you buy one, don't wash it between brews - eventually it will become so thoroughly imbued that you'll never need to add tea leaves again. All along Dingshu's main street you'll find stalls and pavement displays with tea sets on offer at very low prices. If you are interested in buying a tea set , there are certain points to bear in mind. First see that the spout, body, knob, handle and lid are all balanced. Check that the lid fits snugly and that there is a clear sound when the pot is tapped. Feel the texture; a rough texture does not indicate poor quality - in fact pots should be rough, especially on the inside. Also ask to put some water in the teapot; the water should shoot out, not dribble out, of the spout when poured. Lastly, don't forget to bargain - as a general rule, you should not pay any higher than 75 percent of the shopkeeper's first offer.

Dingshan is also where replacement roof tiles and ornamental rocks are manufactured for use in the vast work of reconstructing China's temples. The enormous pots decorated with writhing dragons are extremely fine, as are the round, heavy, blue-glazed tables found in so many Chinese gardens. In the Pottery Exhibition Centre you can see both artistic pieces - from delicate Song-dynasty teapots to flamboyant modern lamps - as well as lavatory bowls and sparkplug insulators.