Photos

This is a view of a traditional brick plant in Ji Xian.

The brick wall you can see on the left is the outer wall of the ring kiln (furnace). This kiln consists in a ring tunnel (if you look at it from above, it has the shape of a car racing circuit). The workers load and unload the tunnel manually, through the vaulted doors you can see on this picture. The bricks are continuously fired, and the fire turns around inside the ring tunnel. This means that the workers have a limited time to unload the fired bricks and load the dried ones, before the fire comes again to the loading place. This also means that the walls are still hot when loading.
The fuel used is mining residues, that are included directly in the body of the bricks. If needed, some complementary coal can be added from the top of the kiln.

This kiln is not very old, as it was built 4 years ago, but this technology was very common in Europe in the XIXth century. In this same plant, you can also find more modern and automatized equipments, but this is a view of the traditional way of making bricks in an industrial way in many countries in the world. Otherwise, the most basic and traditional way (as well as the most polluting one) is to make heaps of bricks and wood and to set fire, but many governments in the world are trying to prohibit these activities and to promote more modern technologies.

There was a scandal because of a case of slavery in a basic brick plant in china a couple of weeks ago. It is absolutely not the case in this plant, where the working conditions are on the contrary rather good.

As workshop, you can also see a view of the inside of the kiln.