Jingdezhen Ceramics Museum

( chinaculture.org )

Updated: 2011-09-14

The Jingdezhen Ceramics Museum

The Jingdezhen Ceramics Museum, located at Jingdezhen city in Jiangxi province, is a special museum of Chinese ceramics. It was prepared in 1979 and opened to the public on October 1, 1984.

The museum covers an area of 830,000 square meters. Inside the museum are a compound of ancient kiln buildings and a compound of dwelling houses of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). In the ancient kiln workshop, workers can be seen giving technical performances of making ceramics manually to make copies of ancient porcelain. In the dwelling houses of the Qing Dynasty there is an exhibition of the ceramic development history of Jingdezhen and an exhibition of calligraphies and paintings. In the building of folk customs, there is a folk custom exhibition showing the Jingdezhen porcelain industry.

Ancient kiln houses

The museum has collected over 5,000 items of historical relics. Around 100 items are Class One relics, most of which are products of government porcelain kilns, the porcelains left from the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and the samples showing the processing technique of the celadon of the Yuan Dynasty. The celadon pillow with the pattern of dragon and tiger left from the Song Dynasty (960-1279) combines the technique of piercing and picking-up; the celadon vase with the pattern of plums left from the Yuan Dynasty is one of the best among the celadon products left from the Yuan Dynasty; and the celadon big plate, 72 cm in diameter, with the pattern of a sea animal, is a special product produced from the imperial porcelain kiln at that time.

Porcelain made in Jingdezhen

The museum also has an exhibition hall of the former kiln site at Hutian, which is affiliated to Pintaozhai(a room for evaluating ceramics), specializing in the study of ancient porcelains.

The museum runs a periodical entitled Ancient Porcelain jointly with the Museum of Jiangxi Province.

Playing with porcelain instruments