The Kilns of Jingdezhen

It is not yet light. Along this stretch of river, the night never gets fully dark, because the kilns on the bank are still warm from the afternoon before. They throw a deep orange glow onto the brick walls, like embers banked under rice husks in a kitchen stove.

Then the first sound of a new day rises. It is not a rooster. It is not a bell. It is a lump of clay being slammed down onto a wooden table. Thud. Thud. Thud. As steady as a heartbeat.

The man who kneads the clay has to do this before dawn, because the clay must be soft and evenly smooth before anyone lays a hand on the potter's wheel. Not a single air bubble may be left inside it. A bubble the size of a bean is enough. In the heat of the kiln it swells, and the piece cracks.

The sky slowly brightens. Now the town can be seen clearly, tucked beside the river in the Jiangxi region. People have been firing pottery on this strip of land for more than 1,700 years.

Its name came much later. In 1004, this small town sent pottery as tribute to the court of the Song, the dynasty then ruling China. Emperor Zhenzong took the reign name he was using at the time, the two characters Jingde, and gave it to the place. That is how the town came to be called Jingdezhen. For more than a thousand years, the name it carries has been a compliment no one has taken back.

In the morning, the workshop doors open. And here is the strangest thing about this trade.

A skilled craftsman here often does not know how to make a whole bowl. He knows how to make only one part of it, but he makes that part better than anyone. The man who kneads the clay only kneads clay. The painter of outlines only paints outlines, the one who fills in the color only fills in color, and the fire keeper spends his whole life watching the fire. The scholar Song Yingxing lived late in the Ming, the dynasty then ruling China. He wrote down a line that potters still repeat: even a single piece has to pass through human hands 72 times before it becomes a finished vessel.

Seventy-two passes through human hands, for one small teacup.

At the start of the Ming, the founding emperor had a workshop of his own built right in the middle of the town. People came to call it the imperial kiln. It made wares for no one but the imperial family. Then, in 1433, in the reign of the Xuande Emperor, an order came down from the palace.

Just one order. It called for 443,500 pieces. Every one of them had to be painted with dragons and phoenixes.

A number like that is hard to picture, so it helps to work it out once. Suppose a single painter finishes exactly one piece a day, with no days off, no sick days and no New Year holiday. That painter would need more than 1,200 years to fill the order.

So it could not be one person, and it could not be a hundred. At the town's height, people estimate, several thousand kilns were glowing at the same time.

But the hardest part was not the numbers. The hardest part was that all those hands had to paint alike. The same curve in the dragon's body. The same flick at the end of the phoenix's tail. A painter at one end of the street and a painter at the other might never have spoken a word to each other. Yet when they put brush to clay, their strokes had to be one and the same.

Any piece that came out of the kiln short of the standard was not allowed to leave the workshop. It was set aside and buried right there. This went on, again and again, for hundreds of years. Layer upon layer, the broken pieces piled up around a small hill in the middle of the town, called Zhushan. A hill holding inside it all the pieces that did not quite measure up.

In the afternoon, sunlight slants through the workshop doors. And not every piece that leaves this place is content to stay nameless.

This story begins 82 years before that great order. In 1351, a man named Zhang Wenjin ordered a set of altar pieces here: an incense burner and a pair of flower vases. He had the necks of the vases inscribed with his name, his hometown and his wish. He asked for peace for his whole family, and for his children to be safe and well. Then he offered the set to a temple.

The vases stand a little over 63 centimeters tall. On each side of the neck, the handles are shaped like elephant heads. Around the body, a dragon with four claws winds through the clouds.

More than 600 years later, that pair of vases stands in a glass case in London. The words Zhang Wenjin had written that day turned out to be the earliest dated dedication known on blue-and-white porcelain. Thanks to a few lines from a father worried for his children, the whole world knows for certain that painting in blue at Jingdezhen had reached that level by 1351.

As for the incense burner from the same set, no one has found it to this day.

The pottery made here traveled much farther than the people who made it. At old harbors as far away as Egypt and Kenya, people have picked up shards from this very town. Tea is drunk and gone. Silk rots away. But clay that has passed through fire stays, even when it is broken.

Evening fades over the river. The smoke above the kilns thins but never quite stops, because the fires are banked through the night. In a few hours, before it is light, someone will step out again, set a lump of clay on the wooden table, and slam it down.

Yet in those very same years, in another river delta, there were kilns glowing too.

In the Red River Delta, Vietnamese potters were also dabbing blue onto white clay. The village of Chu Đậu, in the old district of Nam Sách, was stoking its fires. The village of Bát Tràng, on the left bank of the Red River in what is now Hanoi, was stoking its fires too. They were two separate streams, flowing side by side through the same century, and neither was the shadow of the other.

Only 17 years after that great order, a blue-and-white vase came out of a kiln in Nam Sách. The year was 1450. The vase stood 54 centimeters tall. On its shoulder were 13 Chinese characters, recording the year it was made, the place, and even the name of the person who held the brush that painted it. People have long handed it down that the painter was a woman potter named Bùi Thị Hý. Researchers are still discussing who she was. But those 13 characters remain exactly where they were, and not one of them has blurred.

That vase now stands in a glass case in the Topkapi Museum, in the city of Istanbul.

Two ends of a very wide world, two glass cases thousands of kilometers apart. On one side, a pair of vases carrying a father's prayer for peace. On the other, a vase carrying the name of the hand that painted it. Both made of white clay, both the same shade of blue, both passed through fire in that same century. And on the shoulder of the vase in Istanbul, under the light of its glass case, 13 small characters are still saying exactly what they were written to say: this is the year, and this is the hand.