He Spent Three Years Reviving the Old Craft of Cement Floral Tiles — Then Turned It Into a Business

He brought back the entirely handmade craft of old floral tiles on his own, gave many people back a fond memory, and put the tiles back into their living rooms and parlors.

Ten years ago, Lin Yuming and a friend rented an old villa at No. 32 Huaxin Road in Xiamen and opened a café called 32HOW.

It was the first time he had seen cement floral tiles: "White curtains, floor-to-ceiling windows, dappled green shade falling across the old, many-colored cement tiles."

He liked them enough to copy the tile patterns from the café's living room and make them the café's visual motif, and he found a textile mill to turn the patterns into curtains and tablecloths for the place.

Later, whenever an interior design job came his way, his first thought was to use the tiles. He looked in many places, only to find that this entirely handmade product had disappeared from the market.

He even commissioned a ceramics factory in Foshan to make some, but what came back were tiles of coarsely printed porcelain, not cement floral tiles. That was how he learned that the tiles are not fired ceramic at all, and that the smooth surface is not glaze but a handmade cement craft. So he set out to understand them.

Huaxin Road, where 32HOW sits, is lined with old houses, and this is the part of Xiamen where cement tile floors were laid most densely. In the early 20th century, it is said, many overseas Chinese returning from Southeast Asia, along with several consulates on Gulangyu Island, had the tiles shipped into Xiamen from Western and Southeast Asian countries.

The earliest written record of the tiles in Xiamen appears in 《厦门方志》, a local gazetteer completed in 1910 by the American missionary Rev. Philip Wilson Pitcher. One passage describes "floral tiles": "In the homes of Xiamen's gentry — these thoroughly Oriental households — there are no carpets; only floral tiles cover the floors."

In the 1920s, Chen Senyan, an overseas Chinese businessman from Java, opened China's first cement floral tile factory, Nanzhou, on Gulangyu. Rich in color, handsome in pattern, smooth and hard-wearing, the tiles gradually caught on. By the late 1980s there were more than 400 factories making them in southern Fujian alone. By the 1990s, their laborious handwork had been pushed aside by quicker, more convenient industrial products — ceramic tile, marble — the factories shut down, and the craft slowly vanished from the market.

Reviving a folk craft, though, was not what drove Lin Yuming to start making the tiles.

Around 2010, his design work hit a wall. "I'm a designer — I think I'll be a designer for the rest of my life — but design always hits a wall at some point. You feel that for several years now, what you're making is no different from what you made four or five years ago, that nothing has fundamentally changed in how you think or what you can do. You're just stuck there."

After a few years moving between advertising agencies in Fuzhou and Xiamen, he had run out of room to grow. A better title could not cover a designer's ambition to "build a ship, put up a building."

He wanted to go deep into one craft. Wood, ceramics, and glass were all candidates. "But once I thought of making cement floral tiles, I stopped considering anything else. Everything else vanished at once, because nobody was doing it."

Alongside designer, he took on a second title: head of Jiannanhua, a handmade floral tile factory.

Confining his design work to cement tiles did not hem him in; he enjoyed it. "Take Tadao Ando — decades ago he limited his material to bare concrete, and even so he produced outstanding designs," Lin told us. "Past a certain age, once your design ability has grown, there is far too much you could do. Even a little work in each field would take more than one lifetime. But if one day you box yourself into a single range, you find the other roads are gone and all you can do is dig in, look for depth. To me that depth is more appealing."

Breadth, in his view, is available to anyone; depth shows you more possibilities only once you are inside it.

He would rather see the tiles as a lucky accident. "You could say making cement tiles is dirty work — dust, water, cement — but what comes out at the end is beautiful, and it only grows more beautiful with time."

Making cement floral tiles by hand is not, in itself, complicated. Lin Yuming thought he could learn it in six months. It took him nearly three years.

Before touching any material, he collected and read a great deal on the tiles. He examined every kind of tile he could find in the old buildings and overseas-Chinese mansions of Xiamen, Zhangzhou and Quanzhou, then went as far as Vietnam and Europe, where he saw factories and craftsmen who had switched trades under the pressure of industry and profit, and also, in the Europe where the craft grew rich and mature, old factories still running well after fifty or sixty years. Only then did he understand where the tiles had come from and where they had gone.

He began trying to produce them without hiring a master. He worked it out himself, from zero: building the workshop, buying and calibrating the equipment, designing the molds, mixing the pigments for the colors. Even the factory's first craftsmen he trained himself.

Inside Jiannanhua's cement tile production process

Making one tile usually takes about 20 days. First a pattern mold is built from copper sheet and copper strip; the raw materials are measured by ratio and the cement color slurry is poured into the mold in one pass. Over the color layer goes a measured amount of cement base material; once the base has absorbed enough water, a machine presses it, and the tile can come out of the mold. The rough tile is left on a rack to dry overnight, soaked in water for three to seven days, then ground, washed and dried. Wax the surface and it is finished.

The craft looks simple, but it has so many steps that a slip at any one of them can ruin the tile. The kind of sand and gravel and the proportions matter — too pure a mix cracks more easily. Curing time affects hardness. Damp weather lengthens the time a tile takes to set.

More important, because the tiles are handmade, no two pours by a worker are the same. Some color sections are separated by only a few millimeters, and one careless moment blends them, costing the lines their clarity and evenness.

Not until 2014, after failing over and over again, did the first sound cement floral tile come off the line.

In 2015 Jiannanhua opened an online store on Weidian. Around the same time, part of the top floor of a Shanghai concept space — built by UMA WANG and other designers for "In the Name of Home," a joint project between Airbnb and Dongliang — was laid with Jiannanhua tiles. By the end of 2015, output had risen from a few hundred square meters a month to 800 to 1,000, a step toward a brand that could run on its own.

Having come through the hardest three or four years, he "suddenly felt himself grow."

Chasing one craft with a single mind sounds like a fine thing. It also meant giving up the ideal life an agency salary had paid for, and failing to look after his family.

"The three-plus years I spent researching these tiles were a very hard stretch. For a long time you can't see the road ahead. You work like mad, you keep putting things in, and you don't know whether it will come to anything. Every day brought only bad news. I couldn't sleep at night, and the moment I shut my eyes it was all terrible things. Things at home got very tense, very fragile."

Only once the product existed did Lin Yuming see that the work was becoming worth something. From inside it he could not see that at all: the pressure was heavy, he was in bad shape, he had employees to feed and his family's doubts to answer.

"Hold on a little longer when you can't hold on any more — that's what I've come to understand at this age." After he broke through one key point in the process, he did something he had thought only happened in soap operas: ran out into the rain and pulled off his shirt to let it come down on him.

Lin Yuming did not have to take this slow, roundabout path. Finding an old master to teach him would have been far easier. But he insisted on doing it himself. Making one good tile, to him, was only the start; he also wanted the repeated trials to show him more of what the tiles could do as design.

"To keep doing what I wanted to do, I had to do things I wasn't good at and didn't much like — and do them well, and get through them," Lin Yuming said. "I don't believe this can't be done. If it can't, then something is wrong with my ability, with my method."

The Jiannanhua brand was formally founded in 2014. The name means "old floral tiles appearing in the south." Lin Yuming explained it two ways: a nod to Nanzhou, China's first floral tile factory, and the idea of seeing the south's old floral tiles again. He brought back the entirely handmade craft of old floral tiles on his own, gave many people back a fond memory, and put the tiles back into their living rooms and parlors.

The more time and effort he put into studying the tiles, the more he liked them. In old houses around Xiamen he has seen tiles more than a hundred years old; with long use, cleaning and care, the surface takes on a patina that makes the colors look brighter and more lustrous.

"Ceramic tile patterns are mostly printed, with almost no pores — like glass. I prefer cement, which has pores and feels like skin."

In China today, anyone who knows anything about cement floral tiles brings up Jiannanhua.

More commercial spaces are trying them out. At the Gulangyu 1930 Boutique Hotel, for instance, whose interiors were designed by Zhu Luxin and Zheng Chuanlu of Xiamen's Gongxiang Design, two Western-style houses built in 1930 pair plain wood tones with old-style floral tiles, restoring the look of Xiamen's old villas and adding a European plainness and beauty.

Inside the Taichung Opera House in Taiwan, in a mixed space holding a café, a bookstore and shops, the restaurant floor is laid with Jiannanhua tiles too, making a grand, ornate stage set — a dining room that matches the character of an opera house.

Having survived the first stage, "understanding" the tiles, Lin Yuming thinks the second stage is "just playing" — looking for technical and artistic advances. Beyond the traditional 20×20 cm format, could a tile be bigger, smaller, thicker? A thicker edge could carry a different color or material. Could it be three-dimensional? It might even become a display stand, a container, or something else.

"A lot of people think a floral tile is just a piece of brick under your feet. I want to tell them it can show up in daily life in many more forms — tables, chairs, decorative pictures…"

With that in mind, Lin Yuming developed a line of spin-off products. GOLDENCEMENT, for one, is his attempt to give the tiles a second life. Making tiles produces plenty of rejects, since handwork and material cannot be fully controlled: some with the colors out of register, some with a broken corner, some development tests or surplus samples.

How to reuse them? Lin Yuming thought about it for a long time. In the end he cut the intact sections out of the chipped tiles, ground them smooth, then wrapped them in brass to make paperweights and magnets. Bookends joined the line recently.

Because so few teams in China make these tiles, and almost no one competes at the same level, Lin Yuming does not pay much attention to the market. Jiannanhua now speaks publicly about once a year — it has shown at Design Shanghai three years running — which doubles as an annual chance to take stock.

An iPad on a stand in front of the booth loops footage of the tiles being made. Just as Lin Yuming himself could not tell what really separated a cement tile from a ceramic one when he first saw it, the crowd at the booth arrives with questions of all kinds: "Is this for the floor or the wall?" "Is it hard enough?" "Why not make it by machine?" "What's different about doing it by hand?" The exhibit looks less like a booth than a small teach-in on cement floral tiles.

This year Jiannanhua plans to open its first city showroom, in Shanghai, as the brand's first offline space. Lin Yuming told us he hopes it will not merely display products but be a particular, interesting place — a two-story Airbnb, say, with a room to stay in upstairs and the showroom below, or some other odd, open space like a temple. The one condition is that someone is willing to work with him.

After that "long three years," very little troubles Lin Yuming now.

Improving the craft, improving the process, expanding the factory — all of it will come step by step. As for not having enough time, energy or hands, his answer is: "If it's not enough, I'll go slower. The brand will go a little slower. It won't die."

Images: Jiannanhua.