Jingdezhen

China's porcelain capital for a thousand years — blue and white porcelain, celadon, famille rose and contemporary ceramic art. The Ceramic Museum, the Imperial Kiln ruins and hundreds of working studios make Jingdezhen the only city in China organised almost entirely around a single craft.

Jingdezhen has been the leading centre of Chinese porcelain production for at least a thousand years. The city's position in the mountains of northeast Jiangxi, with access to high-quality kaolin clay deposits, pine forests for kiln fuel and river transport for finished goods, gave it a natural advantage that the Song dynasty emperors formalised when they established the first imperial kilns here. By the Ming dynasty, Jingdezhen was producing essentially all of the imperial court's porcelain and a significant proportion of China's export ceramics — the blue-and-white porcelain that shaped European chinoiserie, the famille rose wares that filled VOC trading ships, and the celadon pieces traded across Southeast Asia all came through Jingdezhen.

The city's entire identity — social, economic, cultural and architectural — has been formed by ceramic production. The streets of the old kiln district (the Jingdezhen Ceramic Street area and Sanbao Village nearby) retain the character of a working craft town rather than a heritage museum, with active studios, glaze suppliers, kiln equipment merchants and gallery spaces occupying the same blocks. A substantial international ceramic artist community has grown since the 2000s, attracted by the unparalleled concentration of craft knowledge, specialist suppliers and kiln access.

The Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln site (Yuqi Chang) in the old city centre is an archaeological excavation of the Ming and Qing imperial kiln complex — fragments of imperial wares are embedded in the soil and the excavation is presented as a working site alongside a museum. The Jingdezhen Ceramic Museum (ChinaJoy) covers production history from the Tang through the 20th century. The Taobao Ceramic Market concentrates wholesale and retail commercial ceramics, where trade in production-quality porcelain operates at large scale.

Sanbao International Ceramic Village, 8 km from the centre, is where the studio artist community is most concentrated — a valley of converted old kiln buildings and rice paddies occupied by independent ceramic artists from China and abroad.