There is an area with more than 100 brickworks on the way north of Chifeng. The first works are near Qiao Tou, then more at Da Xi Ying, and finally at Wu Tong Hua. Right after the brickworks area you reach a mountain with an antenna on top, called Ya Ji Shan. After this a town the same size as Daban called Wu Dan. Sometimes you have to change buses here, for Linxi or Daban.
Clay is called Tao tu in Chinese. Tile is "wan", brick is "zhuan". Brickworks "ZhuanChang".
Visiting the works was very easy. We just stopped and marked in. Workers would come and greet us. Maybe they never had a visit by foreigners. They happily greeted us and wanted to be photographed. It took some time until they resumed their work in a normal fashion. They work hard, and fast, but there are breaks.
Brickworks are privately owned. About 80 workers have a job per kiln. The wage is between 450 for the lightest jobs and 1000 for the toughest (the man showelling clay into the blending machine). Many of the workers are girls of age 17 and up. Most workers were young. The clay is taken from nearby and blended with broken stone or ash. In Chabuga, they used the ash from the steam locomotives in the railway depot.
The dry clay enters the machinery, is crushed, blended with water and then pressed into a form. When producing roof tiles, these come out of the machine one and one and are put on small wooden plates. The speed is 140 tiles per minute. For bricks, a continuous ĮsausageČ of clay leaves the pressing machine, it is cut into 1 1/2 meters pieces and then pressed trough threads to make individual stones.
The tiles then enter a transport band from where different workers remove them and put them on shelves for one day to harden. This is all under one roof. About 10% are recycled because they are not straight, crumble or other reasons.
Stones are not put on some transport band, but on wooden planks, and then some people push these carts with bicycle tires, loaded with 200 stones each, to the right location. When someone is not observant all the time, the cart may topple over, leaving the fresh stones on the ground and the worker in the air....
Then other people take the tiles or stones and put them on another drying storage for 30 days. On this storage, the materials are kept under bamboo mats. Finally comes the burning in the oven. They put the tiles on fireproof stones, with some air in between. The oven is sealed and fire put on for one day. When burning bricks, the load per burning is 8000 bricks. After one day of nurning they need two more days to cool down, before opening the oven and removing the ready materials.
To do a whole round of burning in a tile or brick factory takes about 18 to 20 days. They throw in coal through rooftop holes, and blow in air by a ventilator.
Finally, they open the oven, and then remove the finished materials. This is the warmest of the jobs. Most of the time, there were no large stacks of stones outside. It looks like most of it is sold immediately. Prices mentioned near Chifeng were 1 mao for a brick, 1,40 mao for a tile, and 3 mao for a rooftop tile. At Chabuga the price for a brick was 0.8 mao.
A brickworks lasts for 10 to 20 years. In winter there is no work, as the clay would freeze. Nobody mentioned how the workers survive the winter without pay.