By Evan
*Click here to see all our nifty Jingdezhen pictures.
**This article was meant to be posted weeks ago, but was badly delayed due to author incompetence and a WordPress bug.
During the last week of 2009, despite ever-dropping temperatures, we had decided ostensibly against common sense and the self-preservation instinct to actually ride back north (see route page here just in case you weren’t sure we’re crazy) just for the historical significance of visiting one of the premier sources of China’s ancient wealth and the cradle of porcelain culture all over the world, Jingdezhen. From the Ming Dynasty vases Indiana Jones threw around in the German castle to the invaluable relics stored in Taiwan’s National Museum down to the fine china my grandma used to sell in her gift shop in Florida, just about all of the world’s fine porcelain owes its heritage to the little city in northern Jiangxi.
Considering its weighty cultural value, we hoped Jingdezhen would be a pleasant surprise, or at least that’s what we told ourselves as we pushed up across the cold provincial highway leading thither (the ride through Wuyuan county was at least visually rewarding in its own right). What we discovered when we arrived, however, was just more of the same, only more so. On our way through the eastern edge of the city, we came across the “New Campus of the Jingdezhen Institute of Ceramics,” which in its brown brick boxes of buildings looked more likely to contain a remedial boys school than an academy of one of China’s oldest art forms. Further into the city, past the sprawling, state-owned complex of Changhe (昌河), a car and helicopter manufacturer and the city’s largest single employer, the urban landscape emerged as a muddy, uniform mess. The streetlights were decorated in the style of old painted ceramics, in homage to the city’s tradition, but they only made the run down tenements stand out more. And the place was everywhere covered in mud, the kind of mud you spend ten minutes cleaning from your boots at night. Suffice it to say, from our highly disappointing first impression, we could scarcely predict how positive we were to eventually feel before leaving.
This scene from downtown Jingdezhen really says it all. Photo by Alexis
