The place where most of the Chinese imperial ceramics made.
The principal porcelain factory in China was the imperial plant at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province. Pottery and porcelain probably were made there long before Jingdezhen became the seat of the imperial potteries under Emperor Chen Tsung about AD 1004. The Jesuit missionary Pere d'Entrecolles later described the city and the art of porcelain making in two letters written in China in 1712 and 1722. These brought to Europe for the first time a detailed account of Chinese porcelain manufacture. He described the great porcelain-making center of Jingdezhen as holding approximately a million people and some 3,000 kilns for ceramics.
A town name Jingdezhen in the province of Jiangxi, located in the southern China, became the center of production for porcelain. A special clay is needed to produce porcelain and set it apart from other ceramics. That clay was abundance around Jingdezhen, as was ample supplies of wood to feed the kiln fires, which had to produce very high firing temperature, and rivers to transport goods to the port cities for shipment around the world.
