My father brought us up in a little stone house at the foot of Mount Daba, in Dazhou, a small village in Sichuan situated 400 kilometres north east of Chengdu. A place where life is pleasant, the air is soft and the people are serious. I used to watch my father and grandfather working with clay to make xun, the pear-shaped instrument whose origins go back 6000 years, whose music eerily echoes panpipes. I decided to follow in their footsteps when I was seventeen, forced into it by necessity. We were poor peasants. I had left school and didn’t know what to do with my life. After several months of uncertainty I decided to follow my elders. Becoming a potter was the only honourable solution available to me.

I’ve worked in this shop in Luodai, an ancient city whose houses are a thousand years old, a Hakka fiefdom, half an hour from Chengdu. Sitting on my stool seven hours a day I make the same movements a hundred times, a thousand times. I turn and rework the clay between my hands, using only a small spoon from a medicine flask and a razor blade to remove any blemishes. Tourists from Beijing and other places stop and watch me for a while, perplexed. Sometimes I look up and play a note or two for them. I see their faces light up…

My job demands an enormous amount of concentration. The slightest false movement and you have to start all over again. Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do, re, mi, the xun has ten holes. To coax out the right sound is like a small miracle. Some of them sell for astronomical amounts of money, hundreds of yuan. I was apprenticed for three years before I was happy with what I could do - before I managed to make an almost perfect instrument. I work for my uncle, earning around 1,000 yuan a month, barely enough to feed my wife and two sons. I keep on going for the sake of my children. Because in my heart I don’t really enjoy what I do: it’s monotonous and lonesome. If I had had the choice I would have been a business man. Money buys dreams. But I don’t have a penny. With what I earn it’s impossible to put anything aside. My only extravagance would be to buy my wife a nice handbag or a flowered blouse occasionally. And for my parents a better quality of life. I’m saving my dreams for my children.

Yu Shenggao is fourteen. He lives with my parents and goes to school. I’m not going to tell him what to do with his life, he’s going to do whatever he chooses. The only thing I insist on is that he carries on with his studies. Otherwise, he’ll just reproduce the family pattern. For the last year his schooling has been completely free and that has helped a lot.

I have built my own house in Dazhou and that makes me happy. In ten years’ time I’m going back to the old country. I’ll grow corn and rice on my land.  Maybe I’ll carry on making xun, relaxed, as I watch the sun go down.