Pottery artists from Tochigi Prefecture offered decade-long support to Cambodia to help recover the ceramic art techniques that vanished after the fall of the Khmer Empire in the 15th century.
In 2005, the Tochigi Prefectural Government launched a project to send artists from Mashiko, its town famous for earthenware called Mashiko-yaki, to a village in the central Cambodian province of Kampong Chhnang.
The village, about 90 km northwest of Phnom Penh, had been a major production center for ceramics, but its biscuit-fired products with no glaze coat were easily broken.