Porcelain decorators paint patterns on unglazed ceramicware in the first-floor workshop of the Jiayang Porcelain Company.
By Karin SchumannLin, a slender 15-year-old, is one of about 100 employees at the Hutian Ancient Folk Kiln Museum on the outskirts of the city of Jingdezhen in central China.Despite his youth, he is expertly and confidently working at the potter’s wheel as he fashions the form which, one day, will be sold in a shop across the street, along with other objects made of the finest porcelain.After leaving the hands of Lin the potter, the piece goes to the painter Sheng. At 83 he is one of the oldest here — and the most famous. The thin, grey-haired man with the creased face is sure of hand. Behind him on the wall of his spartan work station is a brief biography of him. There’s one for every painter at this factory. It says Sheng was born in 1930 and began porcelain painting when he was just 11 years old. Today, he still paints around 200 platters a month. It’s fascinating to watch how precisely and quickly the old man can decorate one with images of bamboo or lotus with just a few strokes of the brush, carrying out a craft going back 1,100 years.Everything began around the year 900, when porcelain making evolved. In the year 1004, the emperor of China declared Jingdezhen as the location of the royal porcelain works.Blue like the sky, white like jade, glistening like a mirror and thin as paper were the requirements for porcelain then in order to satisfy the imperial standards.Since 1982, the Hutian Ancient Folk Kiln Museum has been in China’s class of most-protected monuments. Today its brick kilns are well restored and perfectly functional. Framed by mountains where kaolin, quartz and feldspar needed for making porcelain are mined, and now surrounded by bamboo groves and pine forests, the museum is a magnet for tourists from around China.Street lanterns and traffic lights throughout the city have porcelain-style patterns. Even waste paper bins and street signs are made of porcelain, all decorated with classic landscape themes or painted with peaches or bamboo.At one street intersection there is a super-sized porcelain vase, while in the city centre, a porcelain dragon at least 20m long stands guard. Without question, Jingdezhen is proud of its porcelain heritage.A tour exploring this tradition starts at the Jingdezhen Museum of Porcelain. Visitors can stroll through rooms filled with precious treasures from the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, all the way up through the reign of Mao. There is no museum catalogue, but there are pretty books and postcards in Chinese.Visitors may then head to the Jingdezhen Imperial Porcelain Museum, a pagoda from the Ming dynasty period on the banks of the Chang River.The site was converted to a museum of excavated porcelain objects a few years ago, and all the items on display originate were found in the historical rubbish heaps of the imperial kilns all around Jingdezhen.These were objects simply cast away by the makers for not meeting the required standards. Today, the dumps are a treasure trove, where precious shards can be found. These are then painstakingly put back together again by porcelain experts.In the old Wannengda district, there are also a number of garage-like mini-workshops. And nobody minds if a visitor looks over a shoulder as entire families are at work pottery-making and painting their creations.In such dimly lit back yards, amid the crowing roosters and cackling geese, porcelain plates and cups are being painted. Such objects mainly go to market as crockery for everyday use.Besides all the small private production sites, there are also the large ones where master-grade ceramics are crafted and then exported to addresses around the world.The Hongye Porcelain Company is the only state-run producer. It displays its products in bright, modern showrooms.One highlight on offer is the service that was designed for the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic in 2009, decorated with a red ribbon and red flowers. Only 600 such services were produced.In the private factory of the Jiayang Porcelain Company, the floor is slippery from all the clay lying around. The plant was founded in 1993 — on precisely the spot where a kiln has been standing since the Ming period. It’s no longer in use, as nowadays porcelain is baked in modern furnaces fired by gas.But it is truly astonishing how rapidly the brushes of the painters on the first floor whisk across the porcelain surfaces. Each painter has a photograph, an auction catalogue or a book with pictures to be copied. Mostly they are pictures of porcelain pieces which at that moment are being auctioned off for large sums of money somewhere in the world. Moneyed buyers may even exclusively order pieces with historical patterns. A normal vase, which the young artists spend about a week painting, costs the collectors around €100 ($130). — DPA1 This Chinese dragon made of porcelain watches over the centre of Jingdezhen.2 A woman paints a porcelain vase in a workshop in Jingdezhen.