Jingdezhen: A Thousand Years of Kiln Fire, and the City That Gave China Its Name
At four in the morning on Shuguang Road the streetlamps are still on and dozens of torch beams are sweeping across tarps of shattered porcelain — blue-and-white, shadow-blue, brown-glazed, every edge rounded by time. In 1004 Emperor Zhenzong of Song gave this town, then called Changnan, his brand-new reign title as its name, and it has carried those three characters for 1,022 years. Changnan's pronunciation, carried west along the trade routes, is widely held to be one of the roots of the word chinaware: lower-case china is a commodity, upper-case China is a country, one letter apart. At the imperial kiln below Zhushan hill, any piece that failed was smashed and buried on the spot — not one reached the street — and after decades of digging the shards are measured in tonnes, with many museum objects fitted back together like jigsaws, a crack running the full height of a bowl. In the eight brick vaults Zhu Pei completed in 2021, daylight slices down through gaps in the vaulting onto the kiln site you are standing on. The city is not only ruins: Taoxichuan is the Cosmos Porcelain Factory of 1958 with its chimney and sawtooth roofs intact; the Saturday market at the Sculpture Factory is juried, and has become where young ceramicists prove themselves; and of the thirty thousand jingpiao who have moved here, five thousand came from abroad, from over sixty countries, renting a studio, throwing pots by day and selling at a stall by night. Thirty kilometres out the tempo changes — the old Dongbu wharf at Yaoli, MAD Architects' Earthly Light among the tea terraces at Hanxi, and the Bingding wood kiln still firing in Xianghu township. The food is buried under the porcelain's fame: five-yuan cold rice noodles, translucent steamed dumpling cakes, fried dough wrapped in sticky rice on Fuzhou Lane, and chicken baked inside a shell of porcelain clay. Your first attempt at the wheel will collapse around the tenth second, and in that moment you will understand the local obsession with feel. Includes transport, seasons, where to stay, itineraries, and how to tell hand-painted work from transfer-printed — the price gap runs to a factor of dozens.
