Every town in this atlas is a kind of capital. Jingdezhen is the oldest of them by far. For about four centuries it made nearly all the world's porcelain; it gave the mineral kaolin its name; and the material it perfected carries, in English, the name of a whole country — china.
Jingdezhen sits in the hills of north-east Jiangxi, and it has been firing pots for the better part of two thousand years. For roughly a thousand of those it was the imperial porcelain capital, and for one long stretch — from about 1350 to 1750 — it made very nearly all the porcelain on Earth. That makes it the ancestor of every other town in this atlas: the original global monopoly, running for centuries before the others were born. And the material it raised to perfection took, in English and many other languages, the name of the country itself — china.
The town was once called Changnan, then Fuliang. Its present name dates to 1004, when Emperor Zhenzong of the Song so admired the local ware that he ordered porcelain made for his court and stamped "made in the Jingde years" — his reign title. The town then renamed itself after that mark: Jingdezhen, "Jingde town." It is, in effect, a place named after the stamp on its own product. (A local legend goes further: that European traders, told the wares came from "Changnan," turned the word into "China" — a charming story, if not the settled etymology.)
True porcelain needs two local ingredients — a "pottery stone" (petuntse) for translucency and a white clay for strength, the flesh and the bone — fired together above 1,300°C until they turn glassy and ring like a bell. The finest white clay came from Gaoling, a mountain about forty kilometres north-east of the town. The word the whole world now uses for porcelain clay — kaolin — is simply the name of that village. Add endless pine forest for the kilns and the Chang river to float the fragile wares out, and a remote hill town had everything porcelain needs.
From 1369 the Imperial Kiln Factory stood at Zhushan, Pearl Hill, in the town centre, making porcelain for the emperor alone, regardless of cost, with an extreme division of labour that made it one of the world's first true factories. A single palace order in 1433 called for 443,500 pieces. Quality control was merciless: imperfect imperial wares were smashed on the spot so they could never reach the market — the buried mounds of shards are now a museum. By the Qing, more than three thousand kilns smoked over the town; all nine thousand were destroyed in the 1855 Taiping war, and rebuilt.
What it made travelled everywhere: the blue-and-white that spread across Eurasia from the 1330s, the famille-rose enamels of the Qing, a Yuan jar that sold for $27.7 million in 2005. The craft has nearly always survived its catastrophes, and today the cheap rents and deep heritage pull a wave of young artist-drifters — the "Jingpiao" — who have turned the old state factories into studios. Set beside the other deep dives, Jingdezhen is their common ancestor: the original, imperial, thousand-year monopoly — the town that gave its product the name of a country.