On April 1, 2006, in a CCTV interview program, Xing Xiaodong (pseudonym), a titan in the international ceramics industry, showed off a pottery work, a five-layer hanging ball.
In front of a national audience, he declared that the work remained a "mystery of the world" and that no one could figure out the technology in it for a decade.
Xing Xiaodong, who was quite proud, also threw a bold statement at the scene, as long as someone can crack the firing process, he will give his assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars to his hands.
Five-tiered hanging ball
As soon as this statement came out, it immediately aroused the curiosity of everyone, and they all carefully looked at the five-layer hanging ball.
When they saw the complex structure inside the five-layer hanging ball, everyone felt that it was a fantasy to crack the mystery.
However, this seemingly insoluble problem was solved by an ordinary hydropower worker a year later.
After the hydropower worker cracked it, he immediately asked Xing Xiaodong to fulfill his promise.
Can Xing Xiaodong keep his family property?
"Barefoot is not afraid to wear shoes"
Xing Xiaodong, whose ancestral home is from Shandong, was only 2 and a half pounds old when he was born, and he was almost thrown into the pigsty by his father.
At the age of 5, he left home and began to wander, farmer, carpenter, cleaning toilets, digging dung, stevedores, all the hard work that others did not want to do he basically did.
And his personality is the same as his mantra: "I am barefoot afraid that you will wear shoes." Talk and do things, never leave yourself a way back.
Xing Xiaodong
Gradually, "love to brag" became part of his personality, and he felt that there were too few people in the world who were as smart and serious as he was, and all of them had to do their best no matter what they did.
When Xing Xiaodong was a worker, he was a first-class worker. Yang Junzilan has developed a recognized good hand in the three northeastern provinces.
Later, he became fascinated by pottery, immersed himself in research for 10 years, and produced more than 20 international invention patents, becoming a titan figure in the Chinese pottery industry. There is even a saying that "Xing Tao is all over the world".
His works are collected by museums in more than 100 countries and regions, such as the Palace Museum and the Victoria Museum in the United Kingdom, and are loved by world leaders and celebrities.
Xing Tao
As his fame grew, Xing Xiaodong became more and more crazy:
"For a hundred years, the pottery of the whole world has not made any progress, and it has only come to me that there has been a leap forward. In the field of science and technology, only the founder of the invention can be called a generation of masters. I am such a generation of masters! ”
"The success of pottery depends only on me, and I deserve the Nobel Prize."
Loud words were made on the show
After Xing Xiaodong became famous, he especially liked to endorse his works on the show, and many times on the TV program, he used his three floors in the downtown area of Dalian and a large number of art collections in it for decades, totaling hundreds of millions of assets to make a bet, saying that his craft was unbeatable in the world, and was crowned by the media as a "pottery maniac".
He once made a wild statement at an exhibition in Japan, saying that he could turn the production process of Japanese potters backwards, and whoever could tell the production process of his own work would give away his house and more than 20 patents.
After the words were broadcast on Japanese television, no one dared to fight.
But the Japanese audience does not dare, does not mean that our Chinese young men do not dare.
In 2006, in a CCTV interview program, Xing Xiaodong once again used his work of obtaining international patented craftsmanship, a five-layer hanging ball, to make a declaration to the national audience to block all the family property.
Xing Xiaodong, who was extremely confident, even stressed: "As long as you can do five layers, put it in layer by layer, you can hang it up, a little bit, a little oblique, don't care..."
His words on the show aroused a lot of interest from one person.
"As soon as I saw the show, I was very interested in the five-tiered hanging ball, and I was going to go up and play in this ring."
This was said by Sun Yue, an ordinary hydropower worker working at the Henan Provincial Housing Management Bureau, who had no professional pottery training, but was just an ordinary pottery enthusiast.
In Sun Yue's view, winning is hundreds of millions of assets, losing the challenge because the challenge is an international level of pottery masters, and I don't feel ashamed. Although this matter seems to others to be a fantasy, almost no one will take it seriously, Sun Yue feels that it is worth a try.
The electrician guys are on the defensive
Sun Yue first opened up a studio on the balcony of her home, and then downloaded the episode of the show to watch repeatedly. He wrote down the process steps mentioned by Xing Xiaodong in the program one by one, and then went to the Internet to find information accordingly.
It didn't take long for Sun Yue to figure out the key to the difficulty of the five-layer hanging ball process.
As the name suggests, the five-layer hanging ball is interlocked like a Russian matryoshka doll, with a total of five layers, and the pattern of each layer is uniform, and the inner layers of the superimposed structure can be seen at a glance in the outermost layer.
Moreover, there is a gap between the layers of these 5 layers, which is only suspended by the top ceramic ring, and the balls hanging inside can also be flexibly rotated without touching the outer layer.
This is quite difficult, because the clay is soft before burning, the soft mud is already difficult to layer, but also to use the soft mud as a support to lift the balls inside, the difficulty can be imagined, no wonder the master Xing Xiaodong dares to be so confident.
Sun Yue tried to burn the soil to a certain hardness and then complete the subsequent parts, but hundreds of attempts ended in failure.
He regained his mind to sort through the data, and this time he made a new discovery: it was obviously impossible to hook up the weight of the sphere with the ring. In addition to the pottery ring, it is definitely necessary to rely on other supporting forces.
For the next nine months, he experimented with paper, cloth, wax blocks, and everything else he could think of. When he made the second layer for the first time, Sun Yue was very excited and had a premonition that he was not far from success. Sure enough, it wasn't long before his first five-tiered hanging ball was released.
A five-layer hanging bottle made by Sun Yue
Sun Yue was nervous and excited to dial the phone of master Xing Xiaodong, and what he did not expect was that the results he had spent so long making were actually denied.
But Sun Yue was not discouraged, and made several versions according to the problems pointed out by Xing Xiaodong on the phone, but each time they were rejected by the other party for different reasons.
Sun Yue looked back at the gambling conditions in the show and thought that he had fully met the requirements, and he even made a more difficult 6-layer hanging ball.
However, Xing Xiaodong has always been reluctant to admit it, is he trying to settle the account?
Regarding whether they met the standards, the two quarreled on the phone, and Xing Xiaodong said sarcastically: "You are basically connected with iron wire, glue and other chaotic things." ”
These words made Sun Yue feel that his intelligence and personality had been insulted, and it also completely angered him. The two completely tore their faces, and Sun Yue filed a complaint against Xing Xiaodong, the "World Tao King".
The court decided
How should this case be decided? There have been previous examples.
On May 9, 2003, four little girls in Xianzijiao Town, Daoxian County, Hunan Province, were lost, and their parents issued a reward announcement in order to find someone. Those who can provide clues are given heavy money, and the reward that can be directly sent to the door is 10,000 yuan.
Subsequently, a teacher surnamed Zhang provided clues and allowed parents to find their children smoothly.
But after the children returned home, the parents refused to fulfill their promises, and even bit back: "The child may have been kidnapped by you." ”
In desperation, Teacher Zhang took the parents to court. The court ruled that the conditions of the contract were partially valid, and finally ordered the parents to pay Mr. Zhang 3,000 yuan.
The case of Teacher Zhang and Sun Yue, on the surface, only involves differences in amount.
On August 22, 2007, the contract was established by the judgment of the Luoyang Intermediate People's Court. Xing Xiaodong should honor the asset transfer promised in the TV program.
Suddenly, public opinion was in an uproar.
The media approached Sun Yue for an interview, and in Sun Yue's home, a cabinet full of five-layer hanging balls that he had fired was full of hanging balls. Facing the camera, Sun Yue cracked Xing Xiaodong's doubts one by one.
First, he placed his work in an oven at a 400-degree heat, and when he took it out, the work was intact. The glue is not resistant to high temperatures, and in this case it has long since melted. The master's doubts are self-defeating.
Then, Sun Yue smashed open another work to prove that there was no wire connection in his work.
The interview came to the side of Tao Wang Xing Xiaodong, facing the possibility of losing the rich family property that had been operated for half a lifetime. Tao Wang Xing Xiaodong was visibly emotional, claiming that the duo's work was entirely two structural things.
If you want to challenge, you have to go according to the national patent, and the court has no right to decide. The five-layer hanging ball is only taken by hand when they are on the show, and even many of them are made by themselves. Someone who wants to learn can teach in two hours.
He said bluntly: "That broken thing, still eight months, more than five hours to learn this person is stupid, more than ten hours is stupid, more than 1 day to learn is dementia." ”
When facing Sun Yue on the phone, Tao Wang Xing Xiaodong did not care about his identity at all. First of all, he said that his three floors were bought with a loan and owed more than three million to the bank, and Sun Yue wanted to take the debt together.
Later, he said that he had rented it from a developer, which was not his own asset at all, and the so-called bet was not established.
Appealed
On September 6, 2007, Xing Xiaodong appealed against the first instance.
He attached great importance to the trial. Not only did he change his lawyer, but he also invited five legal experts to issue legal opinions: the meaning of his original boast of Haikou was not really to make a bet, but just to prove that he was the first in the world.
At the same time, the opinion held that the court of first instance did not understand the facts of the case clearly, and did not define the property rights of Xing Xiaodong's building, which was unclear facts.
In this regard, Sun Yue and the lawyer said that this is only the proposition of Xing Xiaodong's side. It is also expected that Xing Xiaodong can take out five layers of hanging balls in the second trial for comparison and determine whether they meet the conditions.
On the day of the second instance, after 3 hours of court investigation, court debate and court mediation.
In the end, the court ruled that the purpose of Xing Xiaodong's promise in the program was not to make a profit, but only to highlight his image of a "pottery maniac", which was a betting promise and could not form a contractual relationship similar to that in the bounty advertisement.
And Xing Xiaodong's wild words in the program do have the meaning of cooperating with the effect of the program.
Sun Yue eventually lost the case, but the first-instance and second-instance trial acceptance fees in the case totaled 1,000 yuan, which was borne by Xing Xiaodong.
At this point, it is also the end of the matter. Although Sun Yue did not get Tao Wang's billion yuan family property, his artistic talent and perseverance in doing things were seen by the national audience, and to a certain extent, he still won.
And after everyone understands the beginning and end of the matter, they also feel that Xing Xiaodong is such a person with such a personality.
Many people asked Xing Xiaodong because of this matter whether he would change his personality because of this.
Unexpectedly, Xing Xiaodong still had a bold attitude, "People grow up in struggle, some people say that modesty is the most unlucky, modesty is the bane of mankind, and modesty makes people backward." Why don't I publicize my achievements? Waiting for you to preach to me. ”
epilogue
Xing Xiaodong is indeed a figure of real talent and practical learning, and also has the capital of "arrogance and pride".
He also wrote many academic papers on academic issues such as "The Origin of Ancient Pottery", "The Origin of Metals" and so on. At the same time, he summarized his own ceramics teaching methods and cooperated with the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang to cultivate a large number of talents who have reached the international standard in the profession.
His works are not sold but only given away. There used to be more than 13 million people who went out to buy his works, and he didn't pay attention. However, he donated more than a thousand pieces of ancient Japanese ceramics to the Liaoning Museum. For more than 20 years, Xing Xiaodong has also donated more than 60 million yuan to museums and groups in need.
For Xing Xiaodong, what do you think?