Jingdezhen

Pottery was made in this valley long before the town had its present name: the combination of porcelain stone in the surrounding hills, kaolin clay from Gaoling village, pine forests for fuel and a river to carry the finished wares gave it every advantage. The place was called Changnan; in 1004 it was renamed after the reign period of the Song emperor Zhenzong, in recognition of the wares it sent to the court.

The Yuan period brought the decisive change. Cobalt imported from Persia allowed the underglaze blue-and-white painting that became the most copied ceramic style in the world, and a government office oversaw production. Under the Ming an imperial kiln factory in the centre of the town worked exclusively for the court, with a rigid division of labour in which a single vessel passed through dozens of hands; rejected pieces were smashed and buried, which is why the site has yielded so much material to archaeologists. By the eighteenth century the town, its kilns burning day and night, exported enormous quantities to Europe through Canton; its methods were described by the French Jesuit François Xavier d'Entrecolles, whose letters of 1712 and after were studied closely across Europe.

Rebellion, war and competition brought decline in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After 1949 the industry was reorganised into a group of large state factories that employed most of the town; their collapse in the 1990s threw thousands out of work and left the sheds empty. Since the 2000s those buildings have been reused for studios, galleries and markets, the imperial kiln site has been excavated, and the city has rebuilt itself around craft, education and tourism. In 2026 UNESCO added the porcelain industry sites in and around Jingdezhen to the World Heritage list.

Jingdezhen is a company town where the company was porcelain, and the trade still orders daily life. The old division of labour survives in the lanes: separate workshops throw, trim, paint, glaze and fire, and a potter can have a piece finished by walking it from one door to the next. Specialised markets deal in clay, brushes, moulds, glazes and kiln furniture, and the sound of grinding and the smell of wood smoke belong to the centre as much as to the museums.

Since the 1990s the city has filled with newcomers, known locally as jingpiao, young graduates and artists from across China and abroad who come to make their own work cheaply among the suppliers and kilns. They have brought cafés, craft beer, live music and weekend markets into the former factory yards, and given a provincial city an unusually young, informal atmosphere. The ceramics university and a stream of visiting artists reinforce it.

Older traditions persist alongside. Kiln gods were once worshipped before a firing, and the wood-fired egg-shaped kiln, an entirely local design, is kept going by a small number of master builders and firemen who keep the technique alive. Local custom around buying and selling is relaxed but serious: tea is poured, the piece is discussed, and the maker's name matters. The surrounding countryside is Hui-influenced in its architecture and shares the tea and village culture of southern Anhui and Wuyuan.

About 1.7 million people live in the Jingdezhen prefecture, a large share of them in the urban districts along the river, making it one of the smaller cities of its region. It lies in a narrow valley along the Chang River, hemmed by wooded hills, which keeps the built-up area compact and the countryside close.

Ceramics still dominate the economy, but in a different form from the state factory era: thousands of small studios and workshops, suppliers of clay, glazes and kilns, industrial ceramics for electronics and construction, logistics firms packing and shipping fragile goods, and an increasingly large tourism and education sector. Tea, rice and bamboo come from Fuliang County, and some light manufacturing and aviation industry sits outside the centre.

The working day starts early in the workshops and the markets, and studios often run late into the evening. Weekends belong to the markets, when stallholders set up in the factory yards and crowds move between them until after dark. The city has grown younger and more transient than most inland towns, with an unusual number of people in their twenties and thirties renting studio space. The recurring local concerns are rents and studio costs rising with the city's popularity, the pressure of visitor numbers on the old kiln quarter, and river and air quality in a valley that has been firing kilns for a millennium.

Jingdezhen eats Jiangxi food, which means chilli — the province is among the country's heaviest users — and rice rather than wheat. The everyday dish is rice noodles, either stir-fried with chilli, egg and pickled vegetables or served in broth, sold at shops that open at dawn. Clay-jar soups, waguan tang, are a provincial institution: small earthenware jars of lotus root and pork rib, mushroom, or pigeon soup are packed into a large urn and cooked slowly overnight over charcoal, then eaten with rice or steamed buns.

The local snack is lengfen, a cold starch jelly cut into slippery strips and dressed with chilli oil, garlic, vinegar and preserved vegetables, eaten standing at a stall on a hot afternoon. Lye-water rice cakes, springy and faintly yellow, are made in the area, and river fish, freshwater shrimp and duck appear on restaurant menus, usually braised hard with chilli and ginger. Preserved and smoked meats come down from the hill villages in winter.

Tea is the regional pride: Fuliang has grown and traded it since the Tang, and the county's green and black leaves are sold loose in the markets. The converted factory districts have added coffee, craft beer and bakeries to a city that had little of either a generation ago, and evenings there run on skewers and cold beer at outdoor tables.