Jingdezhen: A Flowing Scroll of Thousand-Year Kiln Fires and Poetic Living

Jingdezhen: A flowing scroll of thousand-year kiln fires and poetic living. This is not just the hometown of porcelain, but a poetic city written with clay, flame, and craftsmanship. To truly touch its soul, follow these threads to feel the dual vibrations of history and everyday life: --- ### **I. Unextinguished Kiln Fires: An Epic of Red Bricks and Fragments** 1. **Xu Family Kiln's "Time Cutting Line"** Standing at the mouth of the Xu Family Kiln, that striking red brick dividing line splits time and space—below is the mottled remains of Ming Dynasty kilns, above is the neat contemporary restoration. Craftsmen say: "Every brick has absorbed the kiln fire; old kiln bricks ring like bronze chimes when struck." At dusk, the setting sun penetrates cracks in the kiln roof, dust dancing in beams of light, as if the kiln ash from a century ago still floats in the air. 2. **The Rebirth Aesthetics of Imperial Kiln Fragments** In the Imperial Kiln Museum, the most striking pieces are those "imperfect items" assembled from porcelain fragments: broken dragon patterns and half-finished copper-red glazes, once deemed "imperfect" by emperors, yet growing new vitality through their cracks. Before closing time at night, when the last visitor leaves, the arched building complex reflected in the water pool connects with the starry sky, resembling a floating universe of porcelain fragments. 3. **Kiln Fire Codes in the Alleys** Venture into "Chive Alley" and "Windmill Alley" in Taoyang neighborhood, where dark, shiny kiln bricks beneath your feet hide secrets: Qing Dynasty kiln workers paved roads with broken saggars, these remnants tempered at 1300°C becoming the most durable paving stones. In an old teahouse, 80-year-old Zhang sips Fujiang tea from a blue-and-white cup: "See this mark on the bottom—'Made in the Chenghua era of the Ming Dynasty'—it's fake! But the tea is real, and so is life." --- ### **II. Street Poetry: Clay Sprouting in the Smoke of Daily Life** 1. **Taoxichuan's Evening Variations** At Friday night markets beneath the red brick chimneys of state-owned porcelain factories, dreadlocked ceramic artists and callused old craftsmen set up stalls side by side. On one side, cyberpunk mechanical ceramic lamps; on the other, hand-painted blue-and-white "double happiness" bowls. Street artists create Van Gogh's "Starry Night" with porcelain fragments as crowds raise their phones, camera flashes falling like star clusters. 2. **The Thousand-Year Heartbeat at the Blue-and-White Brush Tip** In Sun's intangible cultural heritage workshop, 70-year-old Master Sun holds his brush steady as a rock. The moment the brush tip touches the unfired clay, the cobalt seeps into the clay with his breath. "Blue-and-white painting must be quick—too slow and the pigment will blur; but your mind must be slow—rush and one stroke ruins everything." He points to a replica of a broken Yuan Dynasty plum vase: "See how the ancients painted branches using the 'nail-head rat-tail' technique? Doesn't it resemble the force of a kiln worker's hammer?" 3. **Slow-Motion Afternoon at the Sculpture Porcelain Factory** Saturday noon, as crowds retreat from Letian Market, sunlight streams through the iron windows of the old factory, casting diamond-shaped light patches on the potter's wheel. An apprentice crouches in the corner, adding water to unfired clay, the trajectory of rolling droplets overlapping with some craftsman's sweat from fifty years ago. In the Blue π Café, coffee stains spread at the bottom of a latte cup, resembling the accidental perfection of kiln-transformed glaze. --- ### **III. Porcelain Rhymes of Mountains and Waters: Nature Writes Blue-and-White** 1. **Hanxi Village: Metal Poetry Above Tea Fields** When the "Earth Lamp" art installation lights up on the tea mountain, stainless steel frames entwined with vines resemble a giant unearthed artifact. Tea farmer Aunt Li smiles: "City folks call this art, but to us it looks like bamboo racks for drying tea." The tea-picking tune she hums while harvesting is carried by mountain winds into the installation's cavity, creating natural reverberations. 2. **Living Blue-and-White in Yaoli's Rain Curtain** During the plum rain season in Yaoli, rain soaks the white walls of old houses to a blue-gray, like unglazed porcelain bodies. By the rain-and-wind bridge, 75-year-old Master Yu repairs bowls, driving metal staples through the scales of blue-and-white carp: "Young people use glue nowadays, but I use our ancestors' 'stapled porcelain' technique—if a broken mirror can be made whole again, why not broken porcelain?" 3. **Sanbao Creek's Stream Creations** Kiln slag from generations sleeps in Sanbao Creek, where years of flowing water have polished porcelain fragments into "ceramic pebbles." Crouching by the stream in early morning, you might find translucent celadon glaze fragments that, when held to the sunlight, seem to contain frozen Northern Song Dynasty rain. --- ### **IV. Taste Transformations: Everyday Life Tempered by Fire** - **Breakfast Philosophy**: The intensity of beef bone rice noodles against the lightness of cold rice noodles, like the collision of overglaze and underglaze colors; the sweet-savory entanglement of fried dough sticks wrapped in glutinous rice balls is the reconciliation of clay and fire. - **Midnight Transformations**: The stir-fried alkaline rice cakes at Zhejiang Road food stalls, with flames leaping from the wok, reminiscent of dancing kiln fires. Washed down with iced mung bean soup, the hot and cold intertwine in your throat like "ice-crackle patterns." --- Here, poetry is never abstract—it's the warmth on old kiln bricks, the trembling of a blue-and-white brush tip, the light spots of neon reflecting on porcelain fragments at night markets. When thousand-year kiln fires meet the smoke of street cooking, Jingdezhen becomes the most moving contradiction: rooted in clay yet soaring in flames.