Jingdezhen, a Thousand Years of Porcelain

Jingdezhen has made porcelain for more than a thousand years, and the town still smells faintly of clay dust and pine smoke. The ingredients were local — the white china stone and the kaolin quarried at Gaoling village, whose name entered every European language as kaolin — and the imperial court noticed early. From the Ming dynasty an imperial kiln worked here exclusively for the palace, and the cobalt blue-and-white wares that left by river became one of the world's first global luxury goods, copied in Delft, Iznik and Meissen.

You can still watch how it was made. The Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Museum keeps a working wood-fired kiln, with throwers, trimmers, glazers and painters demonstrating the division of labour that once ran to seventy-two separate steps. The Imperial Kiln Museum, a run of brick vaults built partly from salvaged kiln bricks, is among the finest new buildings in China and stands beside the excavated palace kiln site and its mounds of deliberately smashed rejects.

The living scene is at Taoxichuan, a 1950s state porcelain factory turned studio-and-gallery district whose weekend market fills with young potters — the jingpiao, who move here from all over the country to work — and in the kiln-lined valley of Sanbao, where studios run short courses for visitors. Buy directly from the maker, from a rice bowl to a collector's celadon. Spring and autumn suit the humid Jiangxi climate best, and the city links easily to Wuyuan, Huangshan and Nanchang on a route through eastern China.