JINGDEZHEN, China, Oct 21 — “I cannot think of a more creative city than Jingdezhen,” Tim Winter, a professor at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, told the 2026 Jingdezhen Forum held recently in the porcelain-making city of central China’s Jiangxi Province.
The remarks came in a report published by China News Service (CNS). He was quoted as saying that the “new Jingdezhen” has fused tradition, innovation and porcelain-making into a complex development narrative that spans centuries and continues to this day.
Over more than 1,000 years of porcelain-making, Jingdezhen has become virtually synonymous with Chinese ceramics. But the story of Chinese porcelain, its evolution and its journey to the wider world, was never the one-way flow that many may assume.
At the 2026 Jingdezhen Forum, which opened here on Oct. 18, Wang Guangyao, a senior researcher at the Palace Museum (the Forbidden City) and executive director of the Chinese Archaeological Society, noted that Chinese ceramics absorbed raw materials, decorative motifs and techniques from other regions, while its own production methods and products spread through trade and human exchange to many parts of the world, helping build a ceramic cultural network that crosses borders.
According to the CNS report, the 2026 China Jingdezhen International Ceramic Expo, held alongside the forum, drew more than 2,500 guests from over 90 countries and regions, 450 domestic and foreign companies and over 40 international brands, with nearly 100 overseas buyers and more than 150 domestic suppliers taking part in trade talks.
It is the city’s first major international gathering since “Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites” was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in July this year as China’s 61st World Heritage property, the report added.
Among the visitors was Walid Yari, a blogger from the United Arab Emirates on his first trip to China. He said his daughter specifically asked him to bring home a porcelain plate decorated with a dragon motif, so he stocked up on Jingdezhen ceramics. He plans to return next October to learn how to make ceramics.
Iranian exhibitor Abed Hashemi brought “Mina,” handcrafted Iranian enamel ware, to the expo. He said he hoped to combine Chinese porcelain with Iranian ceramics in a new product, “something with the flavour of China and the flavour of Iran.”
The exchange goes well beyond exhibition stands and purchase orders. As ceramicists, designers and young people from around the world gather in the city, Jingdezhen’s creative ecosystem is quietly growing, from contemporary takes on traditional porcelain to cross-disciplinary experiments with new materials and technologies, said the report.
Young designers at the expo fused plush-toy elements with blue-and-white porcelain, turning classic ceramics into cuddly collectible dolls, with artificial intelligence adding a tech edge to the trendy playthings.
According to the report, exhibitors also showcased ceramic 3D printers that marry traditional pottery with additive manufacturing: users type in a prompt or upload an image, AI generates the model, the printer produces the ceramic blank, and kiln-firing turns it into a finished piece.
Jingdezhen is home not only to the “jingpiao,” Chinese migrants who have moved there to pursue ceramics, but also to the “yang jingpiao,” or foreign “jingpiao.”
The report says about 60,000 people now make up Jingdezhen’s migrant ceramics community, and at its peak the number of foreign ceramics practitioners reached roughly 5,000.
One of them is Alistair D. Stevenson, an artist from Nassau, the Bahamas. He studied ceramic art in Jingdezhen and later taught ceramics in the southern tech hub of Shenzhen, returning whenever time allows. The skills, ideas and cultural concepts he picked up here now shape his own classroom. He told CNS that he considers himself a “jingpiao” at heart.
According to Li Jianshen, an international ceramicist and founder of Jingdezhen’s Sanbao International Ceramic Village, hosting a few dozen people a year was a lot in the 1990s. “Now we often receive over a thousand at a time,” he said, adding that more than 20,000 ceramicists and practitioners from around the world have stayed, created and exchanged ideas there in the more than two decades since the village was founded.
The CNS report said that Jingdezhen’s vitality lies not only in kilns that have never gone cold, but in every generation relighting them in new ways.
In 2025, the city’s ceramics industry posted total output exceeding 102.7 billion yuan (about 14.4 billion U.S. dollars), making it China’s first single ceramics industry cluster to top the 100-billion-yuan mark. Advanced ceramics accounted for 34 percent of that output, up from less than 10 percent five years earlier.
Traditional ceramics use natural clay, quartz and feldspar, transformed from mud to vessel by kiln fire and handcraft. Advanced ceramics are different: made from high-purity synthetic oxide, nitride and carbide powders, precision-moulded and sintered at high temperatures, they offer resistance to heat, wear and corrosion, along with high hardness, electrical insulation and thermal conductivity, properties that are used in electronic components, equipment manufacturing, new energy and biomedicine.
The two sit on entirely different scales in terms of raw materials, process precision and performance requirements, the report pointed out.
In recent years, the number of advanced ceramics companies in Jingdezhen has grown from 86 to 208, and key materials such as high-purity nano alumina and zirconia ceramic substrates have reached leading domestic standards.
In this city born of, and built on, porcelain, an industrial transformation is under way. From ornaments to critical components in precision instruments, Jingdezhen’s ceramics are moving into the supply chains of the electronics, equipment and materials industries, the report added.
From a single piece of porcelain to a whole industry chain, from millennia-old kiln fires to a 100-billion-yuan cluster, Jingdezhen’s story has never belonged to the past alone, the CNS report said, highlighting that the historical depth of China’s “porcelain capital” is being converted into the density of its innovation, creativity that crosses borders and generations, and keeps reaching new horizons.
Organization: China News Service
Contact Person: Mr. Wei Zang
Email: [email protected]
