Northeast of Nanchang, China - 200km as the crow flies - between Poyang Hu and the Anhui border, JINGDEZHEN was producing ceramics at least two thousand years ago, and, despite half-hearted attempts to introduce new industries, ceramics remain the city's chief source of income. This is entirely due to local geography and national politics. Jingdezhen lies in a river valley rich not only in clay suitable for firing but also in the feldspar needed to turn it into porcelain . When the Ming rulers developed a taste for fine ceramics in the fourteenth century, Jingdezhen's location was conveniently close to the original court at Nanjing. An imperial kiln was built in 1369, and its wares became so highly regarded - "as white as jade, as thin as paper, as bright as a mirror, as tuneful as a bell" - that Jingdezhen retained official favour even after the Ming court shifted to Beijing fifty years later.

As demand grew, workshops experimented with new glazes and a classic range of decorative styles emerged: qinghua, blue and white; jihong, rainbow; doucai, a blue and white overglaze; and fencai, multi-coloured famille rose. The first examples reached Europe in the seventeenth century, and became so popular that the English word for China clay - kaolin - derives from its source at Gaoling , near Jingdezhen. Factories began to specialize in export ware shaped and decorated in European-approved forms, which reached the outside world via the booming Canton markets - the famous Nanking Cargo , comprising 150,000 pieces salvaged from the 1752 wreck of the Dutch vessel Geldermalsen and auctioned in 1986, was one such shipment. Foreign sales on this scale petered out after European ceramic technologies improved at the end of the eighteenth century, but Jingdezhen survived by sacrificing its earlier spirit of innovation for a more production-line mentality. After a low point early on in the twentieth century, the industry is once more on the move, and today Jingdezhen's scores of private and state-owned kilns employ some fifty thousand people.