Jingdezhen: Heart and soul of China's ceramics

Jingdezhen is synonymous with ceramics in China. [Photo/Xinhua]

Past Glory

Visiting Jingdezhen, it is easy to see its ceramics tradition, from its porcelain lamp posts and its sculptures depicting different ceramic production techniques.

"At the peak of the industry in the Ming (1368 - 1644) and Qing (1644 - 1911) dynasties, there were 100,000 ceramics workers in Jingdezhen," Liu said.

The industry was only interrupted in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, when, in 1942, many kilns were destroyed in the Japanese bombing.

"There were more than 500 chimneys for the factories, which the Japanese may have taken for a military base," Liu says.

But Jingdezhen soon returned to glory after the founding of the People's Republic of China.

"In the 1950s we were asked to make porcelain for celebration of the fifth anniversary of China's liberation," he says.

Before the state visit of former U.S. President Richard Nixon, a piece known as the "Nixon cup" was produced as a gift. Similar cups sold briskly.

In the 1980s, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked the city to produce ceramics for foreign embassies, emblazoned with the national emblem.

"At that time about 60,000 people in Jingdezhen worked in the ten big ceramic factories," Liu says.

The total population of the city proper was then less than 200,000. Almost every family had someone working in a ceramics factory.

Their porcelain products were popular throughout China, but were so hard to buy that people needed to have connections to buy them.

Once when Liu traveled to Shanghai, a local asked to buy the cups he brought. Worldwide, the products were sold to 160 countries.

In the 1990s, however, the factories went downhill with the advent of the market economy. Workers were laid off, and factories closed one after the other.