Chinese Slates
The majority of Chinese slates originate from the Shaanxi province in China, which is a mineral rich area that measures over 200,000 square kilometres. However, good quality Chinese slates also come from Beijing's Men Tou Gou and Fang Shan districts, the Hebei Province's Man Cheng, Yi Xian, and Xu Shui areas in Bao Ding, the Hubei Province's Zhu Xi and Zhu Shan area in the northwest, Wan Yuan, Cheng Kou, Wu Xi and Ping Wu in the Sichuan Province and various locations in the Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Hunan, Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi Provinces.
The colour of Chinese slates varies from black to red, yellow, green, grey, blue, purple and various other shades. Chinese slates are usually employed for the purpose of decoration - locals refer to them as the 'culture stone'. Chinese slates have been used in China for over 500 years, but the production of Chinese slates emerged as an organized industry around about twenty years ago. In the early eighties, China had ushered in the open-door policy to foreign trade and a certain Government official witnessed Chinese slates being used as roofing mediums in America. Upon his return to China, he went about organizing the export of Chinese slates so as to generate better profits.
While Chinese slates are now world-renowned, certain issues about their quality had to be tackled in the beginning of the export market. In the mid-nineties of the previous century, China had begun to realize that some grades of Chinese slates had a tendency to fade while other grades did not. Moreover, there were other problems such as water absorption and acid resistance. The result was that many export crates of Chinese slates contained both good and poor quality slates. It became evident that new innovations to process Chinese slates were called for. These were put in place when new processing machines from Europe came to the rescue. These, coupled with the introduction of quality control in China, went a long way in ensuring that only good-quality Chinese slates were produced.
Chinese slates, which have been used for various building functions for centuries, are laminar in nature. This property makes Chinese slates easy to cleave and work with. This ensured that these versatile slates became a popular choice for roofing and walling as well as paving. Chinese slates are very hard and invariably more rustic than other kinds of slates, and also feature rather heavy clefting. Like Indian slates, Chinese slates often feature a wide spectrum of colours within a single slate type. This is the result of the processes that form them.
Chinese slates are formed when the sedimentary rock shale and volcanic ash deposited on sea floors metamorphose. Chinese slates are essentially extremely fined-grained rock consisting of microscopic clay minerals with some microscopic quartz and calcite, and can also have some of the minerals found in granite. This gives Chinese slates their iridescent appearance, and the colour variates stem from trace metals and the processes involved while the slate splits along natural layers. This process exposes the metals to the atmosphere, causing them to oxidize and gain further colour.
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