Jingdezhen
— — a thousand years of blue under white.
Not only on a wall.
“The porcelain city. For more than a millennium the workshops along the Chang River shaped the cups, bowls, and altar vessels that travelled by junk and caravan across half the world. The cobalt-and-white pieces still set the visual grammar of what most people mean when they say *china*. The studio paints the river light the city has worked under.
Jingdezhen, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Jingdezhen sits on the Chang River in northeastern Jiangxi Province, about 280 kilometres east of the provincial capital Nanchang. The prefecture-level city has a population of roughly 1.6 million. Porcelain production here is documented back to the Han dynasty and reached imperial scale under the Ming, when the Hongwu emperor established the imperial porcelain works in 1369. The blue-and-white pieces produced for the Ming and Qing courts, painted with cobalt imported from Persia, set the global standard for export ceramics for the next five centuries.
Production has cycled with imperial demand for six centuries. The imperial works ran continuously from 1369 until the fall of the Qing in 1911, then again under a restored mandate after 1949. Today the old factory district at Taoxichuan has been redeveloped into studios and a yearly International Ceramics Fair held each October. The Hutian site, eight kilometres southeast, preserves Song and Yuan dynasty production layers and is open as an archaeological park. Working potters still throw, paint, and finish by hand in the lanes off Zhushan Road.
The museum at the site of the Ming and Qing imperial works opened in 2020, designed by Studio Zhu Pei around brick-vaulted galleries that echo the form of the historic ovens. The China Ceramics Museum, north of the city centre, holds the largest porcelain collection in the country. Most travellers arrive by high-speed rail from Shanghai in about three hours, or from Nanchang in roughly one, and base themselves near the old factory district at Taoxichuan, where the working studios and the night market overlap.