One day in Jingdezhen: China's porcelain hub

By Laura Imkamp ( English.news.cn, ShanghaiDaily.com )

Updated: 2011-07-04

Plaques of achievement hang above the work stations; many of the old pros have focused on this one specific skill since childhood.

Wang Yansheng, for example, is trained to the core for one of the very first steps: creating the shape.

"I like making the body," the 73-year-old says. "In my whole life that's all I've learned, all I did."

He has been doing this since he was eight years old.

These items are only available at this exhibition and range in price from 80 yuan (US$10.30) for a simple bowl to around 2,600 yuan for a large, multi-tiered vase.

While this isn't outrageously expensive considering the pieces are handmade in-house, the markets tend to be a good deal cheaper and you can bargain. As we head back, Wu tells me the International Trade Square is one of the cheapest markets, but that comes at the cost of quality.

In fact, Wu says a lot of the porcelain sold here isn't even from Jingdezhen - but the shopkeepers won't always tell you that.

To make a bigger profit, vendors buy mass-produced clay bodies from other provinces such as Guangdong and paint or stick decals on them.

"Instead of making them by hand, all of those products are machine-made," she says. "So it's cheaper and faster, but the quality is not as good (as Jingdezhen porcelain)."

One giveaway is easy to spot: if a few of the same items have the exact same design, chances are the decoration has been stenciled on.

Another rule of thumb: the whiter the porcelain, the better.

But a key way to tell real Jingdezhen porcelain is its hardness, and that's a little more difficult for the untrained shopper to distinguish.

Jingdezhen native Jiang Meirong, 72, owns a stall at this market and insists she only sells Jingdezhen porcelain because "other cities use lower firing temperatures so the porcelain breaks more easily."

"It's harder in Jingdezhen. And the clay is better here."

But that's not to say all of Jingdezhen's sidewalks are overflowing with copies. Many of the smaller shops sell more unique, original pieces.

Of course, those tend to come at a higher price, so where you shop comes down to whether you're more concerned with quality or cost.

For the women I'm with, it's a bit of both. And as the sun dips lower in the sky, they trickle back toward the growing pile of porcelain in all shapes and sizes, pleased with the deals they got.

This is, after all, a porcelain shopper's paradise.