Porcelain traffic light
For the last 1700 years Jingdezhen has been known as the porcelain capital of China, and therefore the world.
It describes its own product “as thin as paper, as white as jade, as bright as a mirror, and as sound as a bell”.
Despite some reservations about how interesting this whole town would be I was actually very impressed with some of the samples we got to touch. The ceramicists are so confident in their product they’ll let you handle all but the most expensive porcelain items.
Held up to the light the better items are near translucent, yet can be struck together surprisingly hard to produce a clear and distinctive ringing noise. The prices at the factory shops here are also remarkable – a good quality, hand painted, 56 piece porcelain crockery set is well under £100.
There are English speaking pottery tours available at the Pottery Workshop, in the Ceramic Museum, on Porcelain Street. This seems obvious really.
Besides the usual bowls and tea pots they also produce a lot of larger items here which look as though they might be destined for hotel lobbies, as they are much thicker and gaudier than the high end decorative items. There also seems to be a raging market for huge statues of skinny dogs and laughing Buddha.
My favourite part was the exhibition by young design graduates, showing their attempts to make ceramics more modern and up to date. With such innovations as lettuce shaped plates, most of these would look nicely in keeping with a 50s-70s retro style in the UK, but one collection of handmade, hand painted bowls caught my eye as being quite desirable.
Fortunately these turned out to be the work of our guide and she was happy to negotiate a price. I’d decided that I wasn’t willing to spend over £20 on it so when she started the haggling at £3 (which can be 3-5 times the hoped for price) I wasn’t sure what to do and ended up paying £2 and feeling a bit guilty, although she seemed very pleased with the outcome.
The rest of the town is just as pottery obsessed. The lampposts are coated in pottery, the roundabouts are coated in pottery, the pedestrian walkways are lined with pottery, shop fronts are made of pottery and the streets are paved with concrete. There’s the porcelain museum with a fine display of porcelain, the porcelain market which sells a lot of porcelain and the porcelain food court where you eat from plastic plates.
My camera was being annoying, so photo taken from the very insightful Holachina blog: http://blog.holachina.net/?p=634
As a mad hobby potter I've heard about Jingdezhen… tell us more! Your blog is brilliant. I've added it to my blog list on my own blog (threefoldtwenty.blogspot.com).