It was some time past midnight. The fire had been burning for hours and would burn for many more – anywhere between 30 to 80 hours in total.
✦
A wall of heat pressed against my face as I stepped toward the small opening of the firebox of the Ipoh Left Kiln, a small dragon kiln built by hand in Ipoh’s historical Jalan Kuala Kangsar district. I pushed the logs, heavy in my arms, into the kiln’s fiery embrace.
It was only during this fourth firing that Heng Gor, who built the very kiln we were firing at and had watched us struggle to push the temperature up to 1,100°C, finally ambled over and showed us exactly how and when to feed the wood.
Photos: Stephanie Zheng
Like magic, the temperature soared with an ease we didn’t know was possible. We were finally on our way to hitting our blistering goal of 1,280°C, where ash from the burning wood becomes airborne, lands on the pots, melts in the heat, and fuses to the clay as a natural glaze.
一土 — First, the clay
Woodfiring is the oldest form of firing ceramics in the world, and it operates on a logic that runs counter to everything modern craft culture celebrates: control, repeatability, the curated result. Here, the fire makes the final decision.
Bisque-fired pots are packed into a kiln chamber on shelves, sometimes close to the firebox, sometimes tucked further back. Potters feed wood continuously into the flame for days, monitoring temperature with pyrometers and pyrometric cones, but also with instinct: the colour of the fire, the draw of the smoke, the readiness of the kiln.
No two pieces from a woodfire are the same. Results can be spectacular or heartbreaking. Pots crack. Surfaces blister in ways you didn’t intend.
But sometimes something miraculous happens in the heat: a flash of flame produces amber marks, ash pools into a rainbow puddle, crystals form on surfaces in the most serendipitous of ways.
All are beautiful accidents you could never have made on purpose, and minute details can depend on anything from the clay you used, to the type of wood you put into the fire.
Photos: Stephanie Zheng, Alex Goh
The first time I woodfired, I coloured my pieces with commercial glazes against repeated advice. The disappointing results taught my stubborn audacity a lesson. Why control when you’re meant to yield?
二窑 — Second, the kiln
Woodfiring exists in many traditions: anagama kilns from Japan, salt kilns from Germany, pit firing from across the ancient world. But in Asia, the dominant form is a long tunnel kiln built on a slope, its chambers rising uphill like the spine of a creature mid-climb. That explains why it’s called a dragon kiln here, a snake kiln there, named for whatever long creature the local imagination prefers. Heat from the firebox rises through each successive chamber by natural convection, allowing a single firing to process enormous quantities of work.
Dragon kilns spread across Southeast Asia in the early 20th century, carried by Hokkien and Teochew immigrants who settled across Malaya and the Straits Settlements. Commercial enterprises first, they produced the utilitarian ceramics of everyday life such as the storage jars and cooking vessels of the tropical kitchen.
Photos: Stephanie Zheng, Alex Goh
Embedded in them and passed down was something harder to name: a culture of making that has no manual.
三功夫 — Third, the skills
The knowledge lives in the body. I discovered this every time I asked Heng Gor a direct question and received an answer that required me to watch, not listen.
“How do you know if the temperature is right, before you had instruments to measure it?” I asked.
“The fire glows white,” Heng Gor said.
“White?” I repeated, confused.
When someone asked how we’d know when the pots had been glazed by the fire, Heng Gor raised a piece of wood toward a pot visible through the kiln’s side window. The wood promptly caught fire. “It’s shiny. The reflection is shiny,” he said. I squinted from the back of the group.
Where?
The answer was repeated until one day it clicked. He was talking about the reflection of the wood shimmering in the newly glazed pots, still transforming under the fire inside the kiln. If the ash glaze melts, it reflects the wood and the firing, and from that, Heng Gor determines if the fire has been going on long and strong enough.
Photos: Alex Goh
This is the honest shape of tacit knowledge: transferred only through proximity and repetition, through messing up and being trusted enough to try again. 功夫 (the skill) is not taught. It accumulates.
The first pieces I made in Ipoh sit in a corner of my flat, unloved in the way I’d predicted.
The glaze did what glaze does in a woodfire: fought the ash, produced something muddy and neither-here-nor-there – a visual record of a beginner ignoring good advice.
But they are now flanked by ceramic siblings better informed by time and lessons.
In every kiln across Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, there are masters who learned by watching, who pass their trade on by letting you try, who understand that some things cannot be taught, only lived.
The fire decides what comes out. The rest is just showing up.
Three dragon kilns in Asia worth showing up for
Thow Kwang Pottery Jungle, Singapore
Home to Singapore's last operating dragon kiln, Thow Kwang was founded by Tan Kim Seh in 1965 and has been stewarded across generations ever since. In 2020, the National Heritage Board recognised it with the Stewards of Singapore’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Award. There is something peculiar about woodfiring in Singapore – woodsmoke rising somewhere between a canal and a construction site, the kiln holding its ground. Open to visits and classes; woodfiring sessions happen twice to thrice a year.
potteryjungle.com | 85 Lorong Tawas, Singapore
Zhunan Snake Kiln, Miaoli County, Taiwan
Built in 1972 by Lin Tien-Fu with nine craftsmen, 3,000 adobe bricks and nine days of labour, Zhunan is one of the few remaining snake kilns in Taiwan that still fires regularly. It holds a Guinness World Record for the world’s highest-temperature wood-firing and runs an international residency programme drawing ceramic artists from across the globe.
en.skiln.com.tw | No. 7, Dapuding, Zhunan Township, Miaoli County, Taiwan
Ipoh Left Kiln, Ipoh, Malaysia
Ipoh was once a thriving ceramic hub. At its peak, over a hundred factories fired along the roads north of the city, their clay prized for an unusual resilience, discovered almost by accident when pots survived British winters. Fewer than 10 dragon kilns remain active today. The Ipoh Left Kiln, built by Heng Gor, is one of them: a living kiln on land shared with the ruins of others, tropical vines threading through collapsed brick walls.
@ipohwoodfiring | Jalan Kuala Kangsar, Ipoh, Malaysia
