The West has been familiar with the porcelain of China for centuries and most major museums and art galleries have collections of celadons from the Song dynasty, the blue-and-white of the Ming, and the export and armorial ware of the Qing. It is therefore strange that until relatively recently, the town of Jingdezhen, where most of the highest quality porcelain was produced, for both the court and commerce, was almost unknown outside China. Jingdezhen's inland location, away from the major commercial and tourist centres, is one reason; until the modernization of China's transport system the only way to travel there was by air or by boat.
My earliest involvement in Jingdezhen was during the 1970s when I studied the industrial history of the porcelain industry for a PhD, using documents from the Ming and Qing periods. When I visited in 1983, the journey from Nanchang was in a Chinese variant of an Antonov 2 biplane that flew at a low enough altitude to give a birds-eye view of the geography of that part of north-east Jiangxi. It was possible to discern all the wooded and clay-rich hills and the network of navigable rivers that had enabled the porcelain industry to develop to such a high level. Specialists in the history and archaeology of the industry guided me round the workshops and kilns in the town and into the china-clay mines in the surrounding hills, but there was no opportunity to carry out long-term work in the town itself and although local scholars were helpful they were not then in a position to offer institutional support.
Jingdezhen was on the cusp of modernization: the old kilns that date back to the Ming and Qing dynasties had been revived and modern processes were being introduced. International trade was becoming a priority and I recall being invited to assess whether a new tea service that one factory had produced would find a market in the West – probably not. By the time I made a second visit in 1990, for an international conference on ceramics, these developments were well advanced and the town was full of foreign business people as well as ceramics scholars.
In this new book, Maris Boyd Gillette has successfully built on previous scholarship and the research materials that were available in the 1970s. Much of the account presented in the first three chapters will be broadly familiar to ceramicists and others who have studied the history of the porcelain industry before 1949, but this material has been refined and often clarified with the assistance of recent research by art historians in China and the West and information gathered in the town and from discussions with local specialists.
The outstanding feature is the comprehensive coverage of developments since 1949. The narrative of the history of the town and its industry during the PRC has been extended to the early 21st century by judicious use of the wealth of new official publications that have appeared since the 1980s. These include city records, gazetteers, and works on education, statistics, wages and other aspects of the industry.
While many state-controlled factories continued in existence through the 1980s, the intensification of economic reform in the 1990s was not kind to Jingdezhen. The larger factories and kilns were wholly or partially privatized and many closed down in the 1990s. By the middle of that decade, production was dominated by hundreds of small workshops, many of them specializing in mass-produced replicas of Ming and Qing wares – of varying quality – for the tourist trade. The commercialism that had been apparent in 1983 was now the main driving force of production. In the early years of the 21st century the character of the town was altered by redevelopment and there were serious attempts by local officials and private entrepreneurs to revitalize the industry. However, demand for the town's products was weak and the priorities of the local government swung towards encouraging interest in the heritage of Jingdezhen. Ceramic tourism was promoted and artistic residencies were offered to potters from around the world. The net result was the town's decline from a once great manufacturing centre into something approaching a ceramics heritage park. The fate of Jingdezhen in the 21st century is depressing. In 2013 local officials applied for recognition of the town as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. While this reflected a continuing interest by local politicians in the town's heritage, it was also a tacit admission that a revival of the manufacture of porcelain, in the quantity and of the quality that had marked that heritage, was unlikely in the foreseeable future.
Maris Boyd Gillette's book is a welcome addition to the literature on Jingdezhen. It is well sourced and benefits greatly from research in the town and familiarity at first hand with the practical aspects of the industry. It is a pity that it does not end with a stronger conclusion that would make the pattern of the town's rise, fall and reinvention more explicit.
