Processing clay in Thanh Hà village: piling up clay

A pile of clay (on the right) has already been processed once and is going through the treatment a second time. Nguyễn Thị Thủy has cut off a chunk of clay from the pile and is throwing it on the second pile that she is making.It can be seen that the bottom of that pile as already been smashed into pieces and steped on for the second time. When she will have pilled up two or three chunks of clay on top of it, she will cut them into fine messy slices with the traditional spade, called "theo". After that, she will steps heavily on the clay to compress it and smooth it out. The whole process will be repeated a third time for the whole pile to ensure it is smooth enough to worked with.