Former site of Kilns in Dayao Road, Brick kiln site in Liangxi District, Wuxi, China.

The Former site of Kilns in Dayao Road is a brick-kiln site along the east bank of the ancient Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal in Wuxi's Qingmingqiao historic district. About 42 of the original 100 kilns remain, roughly 19 fairly intact, mostly inverted-flame kilns with a few ring kilns, spread over 1.5 km. A grey stone slab and a brick gateway with a tiled roof mark the entrance.

Brick kilns at Dayao Road arose in the Ming dynasty and flourished under the Qing; the Kangxi-era Wuxi County Annals record that outside Suzhou only Wuxi had brick kilns, drawing buyers from hundreds of li away. Under the Jiaqing emperor the kilns supplied golden bricks for the Forbidden City. Production halted during the Taiping Rebellion in 1860 and resumed in the Tongzhi reign, when observers counted brick kilns without interruption along the route.

The name Dayao Road, fixed in 1932, comes from 'Dayao huo' (big-kiln goods), the local bricks praised for toughness and resistance to weathering, as opposed to 'small-kiln goods' from elsewhere. Residents once blackened their house walls with kiln soot, reasoning they would be smoked dark anyway. A Ming-dynasty song collected by Feng Menglong already names Wuxi's kiln workers.

The site lies along Dayao Road on the east bank of the old Grand Canal in Wuxi's Qingmingqiao historic district, stretching about 1.5 km from Bodugang to Luqing Bridge. The Wuxi Kiln Group Site Museum, opened in 2009 on the former Chen Dayao, Liuli and Liuwei kilns, is the main visitor stop. The surviving kilns stand outdoors among old houses, so allow time to walk the road.

The kilns are brick kilns, not porcelain works: most surviving examples are inverted-flame kilns, with a few ring kilns. In 1956 a comparative firing test found Dayao clay withstood higher heat and had finer density than Jiaxing clay, giving Dayao blue bricks their compressive strength.