Inside a Jingdezhen Studio: Where Tradition Meets Today

The kiln house is on the edge of the old town, where the walls are made of discarded saggers and the road is pale with broken shards. Inside, the work moves at the speed the material allows — which is slow, and getting slower as the day heats up.

Everything before the fire

A pierced vessel is drawn, thrown, dried to leather hardness, marked out with a compass, pierced by hand, dried again, glazed, dried again, then fired once. Between each of those steps the piece can crack, warp, or collapse under its own weight.

You cannot hurry the drying. The piece decides when it is ready, not you.

Piercing is the step that most often fails. Each hole has to be cut cleanly through a wall that is barely two millimetres thick, without tearing the surface or distorting the curve. A large vessel can take most of a day. If it cracks at the last hole, it starts again.

A single firing

Everything is fired once, at cone 10, in a reduction atmosphere. The kiln is opened two days later, when it has cooled enough to touch. Roughly a fifth of each batch will not survive, and the makers can tell within minutes which pieces are worth keeping.