Types of ceramic toys

China's ceramic toys are widely distributed, with a wide variety and different clay glazes, which makes ceramic toys form a very rich classification. Ceramic toys have a long history in China, but there are few books on history. We can only classify them roughly here.

Festivals: refers to ceramic toys that appear at the right time in specific festivals. Such as the song dynasty's "grinding drinking music"

Ornamental category: refers to those ceramic toys whose main function is decoration, focusing on the depiction of the same content, which has certain enlightening and educational significance. Such as Gong Yu kiln children's products.

Audio: refers to ceramic toys, such as pottery, which make noise as the main entertainment means.

Fitness category: ceramic toys with fitness as the main purpose. Such as fitness balls for the elderly.

Education: Ceramic toys with the main function of developing intelligence and stimulating brain activity have both entertainment function and certain logic and competitiveness, such as ceramic Go.

Practical toys: refers to ceramic toys that have both entertainment and practical life functions, such as lying cow drops.

Pottery toys: Toys made of ordinary clay after molding and drying are fired in a kiln at low temperature (800℃-1 100℃), such as the pottery urchin in Ceng Peng.

Porcelain-plastic toys: toys made of porcelain stone and kaolin after molding and drying, and fired in a kiln at high temperature (1200℃-1400℃). Such as porcelain carvings of small animals.

Composite ceramic toy: a toy made of better ceramic or porcelain parts and other materials. These materials include cloth, wood, metal and so on. For example, a ceramic toy dog has a cloth chain around its waist, which barks at the push of a button.

There are many ways to classify ceramic toys, such as using shore glaze and plain firing (unglazed) to distinguish, implying the distinction between different types of glazes, and so on. However, there are too many glazes in China, such as transparent glaze and opaque glaze, flowing glaze and non-flowing glaze, monochrome glaze and multicolor glaze, and even the different thickness of glaze and the different kiln atmosphere in the firing process will make ceramic toys have different artistic effects, so glaze is not used to distinguish them for the time being.