A week in Jingdezhen with the Wu family potters
Visiting the workshop that throws our stoneware plates — three generations, two kilns and a great deal of patience.
Jingdezhen has been making porcelain for over a thousand years, and you can feel it in the streets: carts of unfired bowls rattle past, and every second doorway opens onto a wheel, a glazing bench or a stack of saggars.
The Wu family workshop sits at the end of one of these lanes. Grandfather Wu still trims the foot of every plate by hand; his daughter runs the glaze room; his grandson manages the kiln schedule from a tablet.
Clay first
“People think the glaze is the secret,” says Wu Lan, mixing a bucket of our celadon. “It’s the clay. If the body is wrong, no glaze can save it.” The family blends three local clays to get the speckled body that shows through our satin finish.
Slow, on purpose
Each dinner plate is thrown, left to firm up overnight, trimmed, dried for a week, bisque fired, glazed, then fired again at 1,280 °C. From wet clay to finished plate takes nearly three weeks.
We could make them faster. But then they would be different plates.
We left with dusty shoes, a notebook full of glaze tests and a deeper respect for the plates we eat from every day.