You might think that a city known as the porcelain capital would be a pretty fragile place. You might also think those blue and white plates and tiles, the ones painted with windmills and canal scenes, started in Holland.

You would be wrong in both cases.

I thought so too: that Delft porcelain was an original Dutch idea, and I even have some of these tiles set into my kitchen wall. So you can imagine my surprise and disappointment when, on a recent trip to Jingdezhen, I learned that Dutch potters in the mid-1600s copied both the technique and the blue and white style from China. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the Dutch potters were most impressed with Jingdezhen porcelain.

Jingdezhen, in Jiangxi Province, is a city of more than one and a half million people, with a history of more than 2,000 years. For at least 1,000 of those years, it has made high-quality ceramics, and its porcelain became a prized possession for nobles and wealthy buyers in Europe.

A matter of time and geography

You don’t have to go looking for porcelain in Jingdezhen. On a major street, even the lamp poles are encased in it. And as I looked around I wondered: why here?

Why in a hilly corner of northeast Jiangxi, far from the fine cabinets of European collectors?

Turns out, it's largely a matter of geography.

The hills hold the perfect key ingredients needed to make the kind of porcelain that wows, but it also took years of history refining the craft, and understanding what those ingredients could do together, to get there.

Kaolin, the white clay named for nearby Gaoling village, is so low in iron it fires pure white, and so moldable it can be shaped thin enough for light to pass through. The second ingredient, petuntse —the local porcelain stone— melts into it and gives that thin clay its strength. Once Yuan potters learned to mix the two, they could fire hotter, make bigger pieces, and hold a brighter blue.

The imperial court picked the very best pieces from each firing. Then, in the Ming dynasty, the emperors built their own official kiln at Pearl Hill, and from 1369 to 1911 it made porcelain for 27 emperors. Each piece had to be perfect to leave the kiln,  so potters learned to work to a standard most workshops would never have to meet. The best pieces were used at court, and given as gifts to reward worthy ministers, spreading the name Jingdezhen's further.

Trade did the same work from the other direction. Merchants carried Jingdezhen porcelain to the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Europe, and each new market asked for something a little different. Diners in the Middle East wanted large plates for communal eating, and European buyers ordered whole dinner sets painted with their family crests. The potters would listen, adapt, and refine again, as the styles and requests changed over the centuries.

My curiosity to learn more led me to a few of the major museums, each showing me a different side of the history and craftsmanship of porcelain.

The Living Museum

The Jingdezhen Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum might best be called a living museum. You will see potters at their wheels, and you might even have an opportunity to try your hand at the wheel yourself. You will also see artists painting incredibly fine detail onto pieces that will ultimately be fired.
I found it amusing to see many of the artists referring to images on their cell phones for inspiration. I noted that a lot of the artists appeared to be quite young, which tells me the future of the craft here is bright. And as I contemplate the future, I wonder if there will be a day when 21st century images— Star Wars, spaceships, Disney characters— will one day make an appearance on fine porcelain ceramics

A place the locals love

The Jingdezhen Ceramic Museum originally opened in 1954. Its glass facade catches the light like ice-crackle glaze, its ground-floor lobby is shaped like a kiln furnace chamber, and its upper floors are connected by long corridors modeled on the ancient dragon kilns used for centuries to fire porcelain here.

Inside, it holds more than 50,000 pieces, and the halls are full of locals stopping, pointing and lingering in front of work made by hands like theirs across a thousand years. School groups move through in a happy crowd, families pause at the blue and white pieces, and the whole place hums. A day there leaves you feeling glazed and dazed, in the best way.

A palace from broken pieces

There's also the Porcelain Palace, a spectacular three-storey circular building in Fuliang County. It was built by Yu Ermei, who learned ceramics in her family's factories starting at age 12 and is often credited with bringing wood-fired kilns back to this area. At age 80, against her family's objections, she spent five years building the palace with her own hands, using broken porcelain fragments and more than 60,000 pieces she had collected.

If you have ever wondered what to do with ceramic pieces that might have broken in the process, or if you have been to a restaurant in Greece where breaking the pottery is part of the tradition, this place may give you inspiration.

From looking to making

Beyond what you can see, Jingdezhen is a city where you can do.

Artist residencies invite makers from anywhere to study, create and work in ceramics in the city itself, and for a shorter stay, studio space can be rented, with tools and raw materials close at hand. 

Because of the relatively low cost of living and the tradition of porcelain creation, Jingdezhen has become a magnet for young and not-so-young artists from all over China and beyond. They are often called Jingpiao, a term for people who have moved to a big city to chase a dream of artistic work, and it has become a badge of honour rather than a disparaging label.

It has broadened to Yang Jingpiao, meaning foreign Jingdezhen drifters, with about 5,000 foreign practitioners at peak, within a much larger migrant maker community.

And if you do go, and start producing works of your own, there is the opportunity to sell some of them in the open air market that happens on weekends. This is the Taoxichuan Night Market. It is sometimes referred to as the Youth night market, but it did not seem as though the vendors had any age restrictions. There is a lottery to get a space there, as it is a very popular venue, and one vendor told me that weekend was her third time selling, so the lottery does not seem that limiting.

I still have those Delft tiles set into my kitchen wall. Coming back home to them I see something I never saw before: 1000 years of history, a wheel, the careful hands of a painter, the kiln fire, and the hands in Jingdezhen that started it all.