茶者，南方之嘉木也。
Tea grows in the south of China.
---Famous Tea Scholar Lu Yu Tea Sutra.
Jingdezhen, the only one city notable for its handicraft art among the first 24 famous cities & towns for their brilliant history & culture designated by the State Council, not only has two-thousand-year history in production of porcelain, but also is a city where all previous traditional techniques in making porcelain were synthesized & brought to their highest development in as early as the Qing Dynasty. A book written in Qing Dynasty entitled Record of Jingdezhen's Porcelain, a detailed account of Kilns in the Tang Dynasty, truly reflected how the traditional techniques were synthesized & brought to the highest development.
The following are the main achievements featuring Jingdezhen's porcelain making:
Choosing & Compounding materials: Kaolin clay were already used in Yuan Dynasty. Now the name of Kaolin village has become the universally-accepted mineralogical name of porcelain clay.
Improvement of tools & techniques with the increasing improvement of techniques of form making, press mould forming, trimming and glazing. In the Ming Dynasty, a variety of porcelain products which varied in size from small egg-shell cups to one-meter big dragon jars could be able to be made, and the techniques of sculptured porcelain products were really acclaimed as the acme of perfection.
In the Tang Dynasty, earliest forms of Blue-and-white porcelain could be found in the remains of some kilns, but firing better blue-and-white porcelains in Jingdezhen began in the Yuan Dynasty.
Furthermore, Jingdezhen was also the original place where blue-and-white porcelain became one of the main streams of Chinese porcelain.
There are too many glazed porcelain ranges to be mentioned one by one as far as inheritance, development and creativity are concerned.
In the long history of porcelain-making, Jingdezhen's porcelain-firing kiln was a good combination of both Dragon shaped kilns popular in the south and U-shaped kilns popular in the north and was then developed into Jingdezhen Kiln which was later called the egg-shaped kiln. This marked the highest level of that time in the building of traditional kilns & the techniques of firing.
In the eighth year of Qianlong Emperor of Qing Dynasty (1743), Porcelain-Making Supervisor – Tang Ying was appointed by the Emperor to compile An Illustrated Book on Porcelain Making (20 chapters). In this book, the technological process of porcelain making was vividly explained and described. The book summarized technological achievements of Jingdezhen ceramic industry in full bloom as a sequel to Jiang Qi's Record of Porcelain-Making and Song Yingxing's Tian Gong Kai Wu which had respectively recorded Jingdezhen’s porcelain-making techniques of the Song, Yuan, and Ming Dynasties.
Handmaking Production Process of JingDeZhen Porcelain
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