Writing about the places we travel, the people who make things with their hands, and the particular quality of time that slow travel gives you.
The Last Kiln Masters of Jingdezhen — Manuscript 001 · March 2026
On the ceramicists who have been firing the same kiln for forty years, and what that kind of continuity feels like to be around.
His name is Master Chen. He is sixty-three years old, and he has been firing the same dragon kiln every Thursday for the better part of four decades. When I ask him through our interpreter what he thinks about when he's loading it, he looks at me the way you look at someone who has just asked you what you think about when you breathe.
Jingdezhen is not what I expected. I had pictured something more museum-like. Preserved. A place that knew it was important. Instead it feels like a city that has simply never stopped. The clay dust in the air is real. The coal smoke from the remaining wood-fired kilns is real.
Jingdezhen has been producing porcelain for over seventeen hundred years. Not intermittently. Continuously. There were kilns here under the Han dynasty. There were kilns here when the Song emperors made it the official imperial supplier in the tenth century. The knowledge of how to make porcelain passed from father to son, from master to apprentice, down a chain that has never fully broken.
Master Chen is one of the people at the end of that chain. He learned from his father, who learned from his. He has one apprentice now, a twenty-six-year-old from Jiangxi Province who spent a year trying to find him.
"The kiln doesn't know who you are. It doesn't care how many years you've done it. Every firing is the first one." — Master Chen
What is strange about being around someone like this — someone who has done one thing for forty years — is that it does something to your sense of time. You start to notice how fast you move. How quickly you check your phone. How you are already thinking about the next thing before the current thing is finished. He is not like this. He is entirely in the trimming. The bowl exists completely. There is nothing else happening.
On Day Five, when we open the kiln, one of my pieces has cracked. A clean crack, straight across the base. Master Chen picks it up and examines it. He says something. The interpreter translates: "The fire found a weakness." Then he sets it down next to the pieces that made it, and I notice he arranges them with the same care.
I carried the cracked bowl home in my carry-on bag, wrapped in a t-shirt. It sits on my desk now. I look at it more than the ones that survived.
This essay was written during and after the Jingdezhen pilot cohort, 2024. The Story Studio · Volume I · Hands, Fire, Mud.