Mengrai Kilns

Mengrai Kilns traces to 1973, when Dr. Srisukri, a Thai forensics specialist, the British Consul Donald Gibson, and engineer Alex Walker -- who had met while working at Suan Dok Hospital in Chiang Mai -- opened a celadon factory together in Ton Pao village, San Kamphaeng, the district long associated with the region's ceramics trade. The workshop specializes in celadon, the jade-and-cobalt reduction-fired stoneware historically tied to mainland Southeast Asian kilns, alongside unglazed pottery, vases and terracotta sculpture. Dr. Srisukri's daughter, Duangkamol, has since taken over the business; trained as a microbiologist, she has applied that scientific background directly to refining glaze chemistry and firing methods rather than treating the workshop as a purely traditional craft operation. Around 30 workers now throw, trim and glaze each piece at the company's Old City premises on Soi Samlan 6, where a retail gallery sits alongside the working studio and is open daily. More than fifty years after its founding by a doctor, a diplomat and an engineer with a shared interest in ceramics, the workshop remains a hands-on production operation, with tableware, tea sets and lamp bases still made on the same site where the kilns first fired.