The Cloisonne Factory was a tour that everyone was curious about. We had all seen the beautiful vases and jewelery and had always wondered how they made the beautiful articles. Like most things that are beautiful, they are hand made, no mass production here. The item, say a vase, is first formed out of copper. Then the craftsman glue tiny pieces of brass to the sides of the copper vase. This brass piece becomes the edge of any thing on the vase like a flower or bird. The brass pieces are hand cut by the craftsman to the correct length and shape. In many cases like a bird, they make hundreds of these pieces to make the feathers. After all the pieces are glued onto the vase, paint is applied with an eyedropper into each space on the vase. After the final colors are applied with the eyedroppers, then a protective coat of white is applied. The vase with all the colors is then fired in a furnace 6 times to harden the paint into a porcelien type surface. After the firing process is completed, the vase is then sent to another craftsman that grinds all the various coats of paints down until the edges of all the little brass pieces are showing through and the grinding then turns to polishing. When the polishing is finished the vase looks like a picture where every line is made of gold, except the gold lines are actually the edges of the brass pieces that have been polished. One craftsman does all the preparation work on each vase, from the cutting of the pieces, to gluing them on, to putting all the various colors of paints into the correct space on the vase. The large vase is $35,000 US dollars.