Today was the first official day of our grant research! We started early by visiting the Jingdezhen Shard Antique Market which features antique collectors from different regions of China. They travel in every Monday and Tuesday morning to sell various antiques and other collectibles (posters, books, snuff bottles, hairpins etc). The market gets its name from the vast array of pottery shards sold there. The shards are anywhere from hundreds of years old to contemporary and require a good eye for dating and pricing!

In the afternoon we headed to the Antique Kiln Ceramic History Museum. This site is set-up as a traditional ceramic village, exhibiting the different aspects of an entire working porcelain village. The village included different types of kilns, including a large dragon kiln built on a sloping hill, a temple, a traditional residential area and a working factory. We were able to watch the entire progression of a porcelain piece from being thrown on a hand-wheel to the painting and glazing process.
 
Jingdezhen is known as the "Porcelain City of China". It has over a thousand year history of porcelain making and was the center for the imperial kilns during the Song, Ming and Qing Dynasties. It continues to be an active ceramic production city with unique forms and techniques made possible by properties of the regional clay.

To conclude our time in Jingdezhen. Eartha had mentioned visiting the artist Gan Daofu. He graduated from the Jingdezhen Ceramic Art Institute a couple years ago and is now a guest instructor working with fourth-year students. He and eight other young artists have formed a group called Ice Blue and rented a gallery space to show their work in the Sculpture Factory area. My friend Bai Xu set up the interview for us and the students were able to interview him about his work and teaching. He talked about respecting the blue and white tradition that is so prevalent in Jingdezhen but break and make his own statement. He told me he attempts to paint from the heart.

I also brought the students to the Jingdezhen Ceramic Art Institute to meet with our interpreter - Zhang Jing's - professor Cao Jian Wen. He is Dean of the Department of History expert on porcelain. We met in his office and had tea from 100 year old tea bowls from the Ch'ing Dynasty. We were able to touch and hold two bowls from his collection dating back 1000 years to the Song Dynasty. He also brought out four porcelain buttons that a local farmer found buried in the earth. These objects had been buried for disposal at the end of the cultural revolution. The farmer has been storing them away for years waiting for the right time to bring them out with an interest in selling. Professor Cao Jian Wen talked to us about his research and explained how during the Cultural Revolution Jingdezhen had shut down to making traditional work and new factories were constructed to make mass-produced government directed utilitarian forms for the people. These factories in turn were abandoned or converted back to the small workshops producing the blue on white traditional ware along with entrepreneurs looking for new markets in the ceramic world.