A disappearing industry
If it’s a dying industry, why put up with all the hassles and hard work?
“I felt I just had to do it!” Li Yongxing often laments that young people aren’t going into the industry. With no one else of his generation seemingly inclined to learn the old techniques, Li decided it was incumbent upon him to carry on the tradition. When his father first taught him how to make charcoal, Li had thought he would just have a little fun with it in his spare time. He never intended to make it his main career.
To produce charcoal, you need first and foremost the raw material: firewood. But with growing prohibitions on cutting, there is less and less available. Li purchases some of the wood he uses, and some is given to him by friends, but at any rate he’s got to go up to the mountains to cut all of it himself.
“Before felling a tree, he first pays tribute to its spirit,” says Chen Shengzong, a friend who has long tagged along to make a record of what Li is doing and has taken special note of this gesture of appreciation.
Only when he’s accumulated enough wood will Li fire the kiln to produce charcoal. The wood can’t just be thrown in the kiln willy-nilly. There’s an art to stacking it. And with greater experience, more and more wood can be placed in the same limited amount of space.
As a general rule, you create a meter-wide base of large pieces of wood and then stack smaller and thinner pieces on top of it, thus filling the kiln in layers.
After the wood has been stacked, the doorway to the kiln has to be sealed, with just a small hole from the fire chamber and an opening at the top to release the smoke. Li is expert at sealing the kiln. He fills the doorway with bricks and seals the gaps with mud. “You can’t let air in, or the fire will turn the wood to ash instead of charcoal,” he says.
Between the door to the fire chamber and the larger kiln filled with wood, there’s a wall with the aforementioned opening. “You light the fire so that the smoke enters the kiln to char the wood. You don’t want the wood in the kiln exposed directly to flames.”
The kiln will smolder for 25–26 days at the fastest. To keep the fire in the chamber going, most nights Li has got to get up and check on it every three hours or so.
How do you know when the wood has become charcoal? The elder Li says mysteriously, “There is a sign.”
The “sign” is a stick that he has inserted into a hole in the brick-filled kiln doorway about 80 cm off the ground. “When the stick has turned into charcoal, it means that all the wood in the kiln has turned as well, and you can start to extinguish the fire.”
After felling a tree, you’ve got to cut it into convenient lengths for moving off the mountain.