Jingdezhen has been brilliant. Song Zhenzong gave it the name of the place, and it influenced the world with its porcelain-making skills, and in the 16th century, there were only three Chinese cities marked on the map of British museums: Beijing, Chang'an, and Jingdezhen. Jingdezhen was frustrated. It has entered a trough in the wave of industrial mass production, and the dominance of the porcelain market has also been overtaken by other cities.
In 2023, follow young people to re-see Jingdezhen, what the famous scholar Joseph Needham called "the world's earliest industrial city", trekking on the road of transformation and repositioning its role.
Reporter Wang Jingxue and Tian Zhaohui.
In a way that even locals never expected, in 2023, people will reacquaint themselves with "Jingdezhen".
On social networking, young people have sprung up, giving this ancient city in Jiangxi a variety of new labels. If you string together a string of hot words about Jingdezhen on several major social platforms this year, you will find that each string is not the same as the thousand-year-old "porcelain capital" in people's impressions. For example:
Go to the town to catch the market" "I want to go to Jingdezhen to play in the mud".
Ceramic bracelet ten yuan three strings" "no one can walk out of Jingdezhen empty-handed".
This is the tone of the young man. Only when young people visit museums will they find subtle humor on the face of a "pensive arhat" who has been sitting quietly for many years, make it into a meme that goes viral on the Internet, and then brush their forearms in the market, revealing a string of beads that look like sleeves.
Judging from the data: in the summer, Jingdezhen jumped to second place in the hot search list of cultural attractions in the Xiaohongshu cultural tourism industry in August, sandwiched between "Disney" and "Universal Studios", as if it was a ceramic theme amusement park;Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day, "Jingdezhen is really hot" ranked fourth on the Douyin hot search list;At the end of the year, data from Meituan and Dianping showed that the number of notes with Jingdezhen as the keyword increased by 3 times year-on-year, and the number of tourism consumption bookings in Jingdezhen increased by 181% compared with 2019.
Many people come here to learn that Jingdezhen is actually a city. In the 50s of the last century, Jingdezhen was upgraded from the town and was ready to be renamed "Jingdezhen City", * the prime minister pointed out that "Jingdezhen" is a world-famous brand that should be cherished, so it was renamed "Jingdezhen City". As a result, today's Jingdezhen still regards itself as a "town", and the slogans on the street are low-key and heroic, saying that there are "beautiful scenery, virtue, town life" and "a porcelain carrying the ancient and modern, and a town knowing China".
Change: "The most people's year".
The end of the year is the off-season for tourism in Jingdezhen. On one working day, in the exhibition area on the 6th floor of the Chinese Ceramics Museum in Jingdezhen, nearly 20 visitors lined up and moved to the location where they could take pictures of the Internet celebrity "Speechless Buddha" at close range. A foreign couple took a photo and excitedly exclaimed, "Look at his face!"”
At 8 o'clock in the evening in the Imperial Kiln Factory National Archaeological Site Park, there was also a long queue in front of the check-in booth where you could take pictures of Jingdezhen's landmark building Longzhu Pavilion through the cracks in porcelain.
At the weekend market in Taoxichuan Cultural and Creative District, the anchors holding the ** pole were sandwiched among the tourists and wandered through different stalls. In the cold wind, the young stall owner tightened his thick coat and introduced his work to the customers.
It was the most crowded year. "More than one Jingdezhen person told me this – a taxi driver, a restaurateur, a security guard at the entrance of the museum, and Jiang Zhihui, a native of Jingdezhen.
In the spring of 2020, Jiang Zhihui and his wife Xiaolei opened a ceramic buyer shop "Fang Fangting" at the entrance of the earliest creative market "Lotte Creative Market" in Jingdezhen in the sculpture porcelain factory park, mainly promoting the works of young craftsmen in Jingdezhen, which was quickly welcomed by young tourists and became a well-known Internet celebrity store.
One end is connected to the craftsmen, the other is connected to the tourists, and the store is like a window, from which the owner of the heart can get an exclusive perspective.
Basically, every three months this year, some new business formats will appear. Jiang Zhihui said. At the beginning of the year, he found that there were many young people playing with mud in Jingdezhen, and it was very difficult to sign up for pottery training classes. A few months later, the number of pottery shops exploded, and the corners of the city were all over the city. Then, there were more stalls selling "ten yuan and three strings" ceramic bracelets. This kind of product, which was completely unmainstream in the past, has almost become a symbol of Jingdezhen on the Internet, and in turn has affected the real Jingdezhen.
In Jiang Zhihui's view, Jingdezhen's appeal to tourists lies in the unique scene it offers. "Nowadays, many cities are seriously homogeneous, while Jingdezhen has different scenes, industries and people. ”
The huge kiln chimneys, the street lamps inserted in ceramic bottles, the ceramics in museums, the young craftsmen who focus on creative design and sell "unique", the craftsmen who only do one thing in their lives, and even the shops with the words "kiln", "clay" and "glaze blowing machine" written on the street signs, have stimulated people's curiosity and desire to share, and after the amplification of the Internet, they have especially touched young people who pursue personalized experiences.
Jiang Zhihui is a "post-85" who studied Chinese painting in Nanjing, and loves history and antiquities. After graduating from university in 2007, he returned to his hometown and joined a ceramic company. At that time, job opportunities in Jingdezhen were limited, and most young people wanted to go to the big city. "Looking back, no one would have imagined that Jingdezhen would become what it is now. ”
A year before he opened the boutique, Jiang Zhihui resigned from the company. In the summer of this year, the Jingdezhen National Ceramic Culture Inheritance and Innovation Pilot Zone was approved, which is the only cultural pilot zone in the country. Reading the blueprint of the pilot zone, Jiang Zhihui had a hunch that "the future changes in Jingdezhen are historic." In the second year after the store opened, Jiang Zhihui lamented that Jingdezhen seemed to be pressed the fast-forward button.
The city's appearance is constantly renewed, and a number of new landmarks have sprung up. The small town, which had been sluggish in the great changes of the past era, has turned its clock back this time.
A lot of cities have solidified, this year, and next year. But in Jingdezhen, everything is still changing at a high speed. Jiang Zhihui said. The acceleration of the city is also reflected in him himself - since the opening of the first store, in less than 4 years, he and Xiaolei have opened 4 more physical stores, formed a team of about 10 people, and are recently packing up a 500-square-meter site to prepare for new projects.
Fast is a force that makes a city seem vibrant, but slow is also a power.
It's too fast, and people won't have time to think. In the past, some places were renovated and demolished. Jingdezhen has developed slowly, but it has retained many things, such as the cityscape of different periods. The current Taoxichuan, before the renovation was one of the top ten porcelain factories in the universe porcelain factory, the old factory has been abandoned for many years, has not been demolished. The Taoyangli historical and cultural district built in recent years has also retained the block structure, and it is not so urgent. Sometimes, slow is fast. Jiang Zhihui spoke unhurriedly. Although it operates several stores, it is not in a hurry. When showing up in the store, one of his most important jobs is to chat with visitors, get information, output opinions, observe and be observed.
In November, within a week, two young anthropologists approached him to learn about the situation in Jingdezhen. A researcher told Jiang Zhihui that he had done fieldwork in a certain place before, and the locals said that only three scholars had been there in the past 20 years. "And I met two in a week, and the density was too high. Jiang Zhihui said, "In fact, since last year, some scholars have come to me to do ...... in sociology, anthropology, communication, and cultural heritage protection."”
He decided to initiate an offline discussion and invite researchers who were doing fieldwork in Jingdezhen to get together and talk about their research and findings. It's not like a shopkeeper's job, but Jiang Zhihui will do it. He has always been concerned about the changes in his hometown, and calls himself a "wild observer" in Jingdezhen.
Within a few days of the invitation being posted on the Internet, thirty or forty people came, including some interested observers. Everyone sighed about how so many researchers gathered in Jingdezhen at the same time, chatted for more than three hours, and planned to do a fieldwork seminar every month in the future. "The fact that so many researchers from related disciplines can be summoned in a short period of time may itself show the extent of the attention that Jingdezhen is currently attracting at present. Jiang Zhihui said.
Change in Jingdezhen reached its highest level in a decade this year. He felt a sense of urgency that if he didn't keep an eye on it, he could miss one of the most dramatic moments in Jingdezhen's history.
The ancient city is adjusting its pace in a rapidly changing state. "It's amazing that I am clearly aware that I am participating in a historical process. And I think the changes in Jingdezhen have just begun. ”
Attraction: "The moment when the heart lights up".
At the Jingdezhen Fieldwork Seminar, Chen Jin, a Ph.D. in anthropology in the United States, mentioned a firework.
It was the fireworks that a young man from Shanghai saw on Chinese New Year's Eve when he visited Jingdezhen during the Spring Festival this year. When the night sky was illuminated, he felt that his heart was also illuminated, and he felt the freedom he had not seen for a long time. He told Chen Jin that it was because of this trivial incident that he moved to Jingdezhen to do "Jingpiao".
"Jingpiao" refers to outsiders who work and live in Jingdezhen. According to statistics, there are currently about 60,000 "Jingpiao" in Jingdezhen, and the population of Jingdezhen has shown a net inflow trend in the past decade.
I have heard a lot of stories about a young man who encounters a moment when his heart lights up, gives up his past life, and lives in Jingdezhen. Chen Jin said.
Before returning to China this year, Chen Jin's impression of Jingdezhen was still that a rich boss of a certain age went to buy ceramics.
After returning to China, she heard from a group of college undergraduates that it had become a "holy land of literature and youth" and "new Dali" for idealists to heal themselves.
In September, Chen Jin rented a house in Jingdezhen and began research. She tried to experience what attracted "Jingpiao" to the magnet of Jingdezhen.
What attracts Chen Jin, as well as many young "Jingpiao", is the cost of living and transportation distance in the small town. The rent is cheap, you don't get tired of going out, and most places can be reached in half an hour.
Chen Jin enrolled in the pottery class, learning to draw blanks and hand pinching, and at the end of the day, his back hurt, and he found that the students who shouted "lie flat" in their mouths were all "rolled" and happy. "Classes started from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and when school ended, I was about to leave with my bag and found that no one had left the classroom, not even the teacher. It is said that during the summer vacation class, some students will 'roll' until two or three o'clock in the morning. ”
This seems to be a common phenomenon. One afternoon, a few pottery students who had come out for lunch told me that they left the classroom early at 10:30 every night, and some would do it at one or two o'clock, or even all night.
After leaving the performance appraisal, the "disappointed people in Dachang" learned to take the initiative to work overtime here, "giving up in Dachang 996 and running to Jingdezhen 007". Some people get a spiritual massage in the kneading of clay - all beautiful porcelain is originally a mass of clay, and their own hands create objects that are at least unique, even if ugly and crude.
When Jingdezhen is compared to Dali, some people distinguish between the two: Dali provides "natural healing", and Jingdezhen provides "creative healing";The big physiotherapy "emotional injury", Jingdezhen treatment "work injury".
Many of them come from cities with better economic development and more job opportunities. The relationship between work and life is a proposition they care about.
Does my work make sense?Has my work changed the world for the better?Has my work made me a better person?
I was told about the confusion about the value of my past work, the high pressure, burnout, and tiresome intrigues I felt. A girl who worked in a handicraft shop used to work in Shenzhen, and said that her life was very depressed at that time. In order to quit her job, she worked hard to save money every day, shared the house with others, cooked her own meals, and sorted out some electronic information when she had time and sold it online.
This kind of 'Jingpiao' is fundamentally different from 'North Drift'. 'North Drift' is for you to work hard in order to have a better life and a place with more room for development'Jing Piao' is when you take the initiative to give up some opportunities to go to the sense of oppression and competition in a less competitive environment. Jiang Zhihui said.
He summarized the characteristics of this group as follows: generally more sensitive, generally more idealistic, and concerned about emotional values. I don't adapt to the cruel competition of the commercial society, I want to control my life and time more realistically, and I value a sense of meaning. There is no particularly strong desire to go up, or it is relatively easy to satisfy.
When society develops to a certain stage, people begin to go to their hearts. You can now understand that some people would give up their jobs because they feel uncomfortable, and this was not the case in China 10 years ago, and there was not so much resonance. Chen Jin's boyfriend, who is also an anthropologist, was curious about what the group of young people who came to Jingdezhen could find on their way inward.
After two months of "drifting" in Jingdezhen, Chen Jin found that the thing that attracted her the most was "freedom".
It's very comfortable!The social pressure is lighter than anywhere else, and everyone is gentle and doesn't have to think about what role they want to play. In the past, when she did fieldwork, she often had to show her value to the interviewees, but in Jingdezhen, "no matter who she deals with, she doesn't have much of this need."
It seems easy to integrate into Jingdezhen, which has to do with the city's tolerant and open DNA. "Craftsmen come from all over the world, and they go all over the world. "Jingdezhen has been an immigrant city since ancient times, absorbing foreign craftsmen and foreign skills, and achieving the world's "porcelain capital" with inclusiveness.
This tolerance, which has been precipitated into the temperament of the city, provides a harbor for outsiders. Jiang Zhihui has heard a lot of "Jingpiao" express a meaning: in Jingdezhen, they can get a sense of group security. For example, people who are seen as different in their hometown can find the same kind here. "The minority in life gathers in Jingdezhen, or it can be said that Jingdezhen is a minority city. ”
But that's just one of the sides of real life. Jiang Zhihui worries that all kinds of one-sided and exaggerated information on the Internet will make people fantasize about Jingdezhen as a utopia. He has seen the struggles and struggles of many "Jingpiao" individuals: "If you want to really gain a foothold, you have to have some ability." People still have to face up to their own predicament, and craftsmanship cannot solve all problems. ”
Chen Jin is still looking for more accurate words to describe what Jingdezhen summons "Jing Piao". "It's not 'lying flat', the word describes them as being too passive. ”
What she thought of for the time being was, "When I came to Jingdezhen, many people didn't know what they could get in this place, but Jingdezhen just had a kind of power for them." "Although there are many voices saying that they are unrealistic and live in fantasy, I feel that it is not important to be unrealistic. They do see a kind of ** thing in Jingdezhen, it is a feeling, for these people, maybe there must be this feeling in their lives to be truly alive. ”
This feeling may only come from a firework and a gust of wind - "Jing Piao" told Chen Jin, "You must own an electric car, ride a bicycle to the kiln house with porcelain on an autumn night, and enjoy the wind blowing all the way, otherwise you will not be considered living in Jingdezhen."
Dream chasing: "one business license for each person".
If you want to find "Jingpiao", who has been stationed in Jingdezhen for a long time and relies on ceramic handicrafts as a business, it is best to leave the city and go to the village where craftsmen live.
It is said that in Xianghu Village, opposite the Xianghu Campus of Jingdezhen Ceramic University (hereinafter referred to as "Tao University"), almost every young person owns an electric car and a business license.
Like many villages near universities, Xianghu Village is home to small buildings for rent. The difference is that there are also a variety of pottery material shops, mold shops, public kilns, ......The walls and telephone poles serve as bulletin boards for the whole village, and are plastered with advertisements such as "Painters", "Blank Workers" and "Plastic Workers".
Many Tao students rented studios in the village to start businesses before graduating, and continued to stay here after graduation. Some people say that Xianghu Village is a "novice village" for ceramic entrepreneurs in Jingdezhen, where countless young people accumulate experience and embark on a journey.
At the beginning of December, telephone poles and walls in Xianghu Village told me that a new public kiln called "Xiangyao" had opened in the village, and that a lost pet was looking for a parrot, two people were looking for a dog, and four people were looking for a cat. "It's worthless and not delicious, it's stupid, dear", in a cat search notice, the owner described his cat.
There are a lot of people who have pets here, so everyone needs some emotional sustenance. Lu Xinyao said. This is the second day of her part-time job at the kiln in Xiangyao.
In Xianghu, a large number of ceramic craftsmen's works are fired in public kilns, and a small piece only costs a few yuan. Within two days of the opening of Xiangyao, nearly 300 people have poured into several WeChat groups, and you can imagine how many craftsmen live in the village.
In March this year, Lu Xinyao returned to Jingdezhen from his hometown of Harbin alone with his cat. Five years ago, she graduated from the oil painting department of Tao University, went to Hainan to work as a color engineer, and taught painting in her hometown, but she never changed her mobile phone number in Jingdezhen. "When I graduated, I thought I would come back one day. ”
According to the introduction of Chen You, deputy director of Jingdezhen Ceramic Talent Service Center, Lv Xinyao is both "Jingpiao" and "Jinggui".
"Jinggui" refers to people who have lived in Jingdezhen and returned to Jingdezhen to develop after leaving. "Many of them are college students majoring in ceramics, and after graduation, they go to work in big cities for a few years, and then slowly come back here. Because the Jingdezhen ceramic industry has a strong absorption capacity, a low threshold for entrepreneurship, a high success rate, and a very good atmosphere for employment and life. Chen You said.
While chatting and painting underglaze on the plain cups, Lu Xinyao now goes to the weekend market in Taoxichuan for two days a week to set up a stall. When she comes out of a stall, she can usually sell things for 1,000 yuan, but there are times when she only sells for four or five hundred yuan. Compared with the life with a monthly salary of more than 10,000 yuan, she prefers the current life, and feels that except for "the summer is too hot", there is nothing to complain about in Jingdezhen's life.
On this day, from afternoon to midnight, except for occasionally getting up to rest and answering other people's consultations, Lu Xinyao was sketching and coloring one stroke at a time.
Craftsmanship is lonely and often accompanied by failure. In a brisk tone, she said that almost every firing has an accident. The way to deal with it remains the same for a thousand years: do a few more and start all over again.
Many people began to think that making ceramics was fun, and slowly lost their enthusiasm, we were already exhausted by enthusiasm, but we still like it very much. After studying Tao painting at Tao University for 7 years, Liu Dan has decided to continue to start a business here after graduating with a master's degree. She and two friends shared a spacious studio in the village, and her biggest life distress was that "it was too cold in winter".
It's impossible to work part-time. In the past few years, Liu Dan has seen a lot of partners around him who have started businesses and done well, and what he wants to do has become more and more clear. "Let's start with products that can be mass-produced. Here, the product and the work are very separate. If you want to make money, make products;If you pursue art, you will make works. But it takes money to make works, so you still have to rely on making products to support your works. ”
In Liu Dan's view, Jingdezhen has the best atmosphere and conditions for making ceramics. I have friends who used to do ceramics in Guangzhou, but after coming to Jingdezhen, they made things very different, and they were more free to stretch. "Because here, you can buy materials when you want to try anything, and you may have to buy them online and other couriers in other places, and the creative inspiration is just for a while, and it will pass after a long time. ”
Jingdezhen's complete ceramic industry chain and a variety of skilled craftsmen support each creator. In the small Xianghu Village, from blank drawing to firing, you can find a reliable master in every process. However, more and more people are renting and starting businesses in Xianghu, which has also led to rising housing prices. Liu Dan's studio, the landlord proposed this year to raise the rent of 9,000 yuan a year to 140,000 yuan.
In the middle of the night, Guo Xiangjie, the person in charge of the Xiang kiln, began to install the kiln - loading the semi-finished porcelain sent by customers into an electric kiln that looked a bit like a large freezer. Most of the young people in Xianghu Village are accustomed to working late at night, and at this time, there are still seven or eight people who come to deliver and pick up their belongings. Someone asked Xiangjie how to make the electroplating process of a ceramic product, and he shared his experience in detail, and he couldn't tell that he was a sports student who was still learning football in Zunyi half a year ago.
Guo Xiangjie is a native of Guizhou, and his parents are farmers. When he was a sophomore, he always wanted to start a business, so he came to Jingdezhen to inspect it, and later he cooperated with foreign designers to order, "the other party paints a work, and I want to find a way to make ceramics here." After graduating from college this year, the day after the defense, Guo Xiangjie appeared in Jingdezhen. "In other places, the threshold for starting a business is high, and you are either very rich or very capable;In Jingdezhen, spending a few hundred yuan to buy some plain blanks and paint tools can do the simplest business. ”
He co-founded the Hunan kiln, and now, he works in the company during the day and comes to install the kiln at night. "In fact, we all know that every year, 'Jingpiao' is eliminated, and a batch of elimination comes again, in and out, and has been replaced. Guo Xiangjie said, but Jingdezhen can at least give countless ordinary young people a ticket to pursue their dreams that is not too expensive. Success or failure in the end, no one will really leave empty-handed with this experience.
People and the city: "the same golden signboard".
Looking back at 2023, Xiaolei feels that Jingdezhen's keywords of the year are: chaos, traffic and fantasy.
This year, Jingdezhen became a traffic, bringing illusions, but also falling into a certain degree of chaos. She explained that "chaos" here is not a pejorative term, and although it exposes a lot of problems, it also contains vitality.
Everything in the present is related to the past. Above all the attempts that everyone is doing, there is the same golden signboard, which is 'Jingdezhen'. These three words are bigger than all the brands here, giving us a lot of added value and bringing people innate imagination. Jiang Zhihui said, "Sometimes, a work is popular, not because it has done well enough, but because Jingdezhen has brought it a strong driving force." ”
There is an anecdote about Jingdezhen's brand effectiveness. It is said that at a certain porcelain exhibition, the banner of some cities is "Millennium Porcelain Capital", and the banner of some cities is "World Porcelain Capital". Only Jingdezhen, there is no modifier on the banner, only three words: "Jingdezhen".
History has never been history. In the 90s of the last century, when the scholar Fang Lili was doing fieldwork in Jingdezhen, she was initially pessimistic, thinking that traditional handicrafts would disappear in the process of modernization, but in the decades-long investigation, she became more and more convinced that tradition will not only not disappear, but will also become a resource and foundation for the re-emergence of the local area, and regrow in our lives in a new form.
All this happened in Jingdezhen. More than 1,000 years of kiln fire has been alive and well here, and today's and millennia-old craftsmen have come to the same land from generation to generation to do the same craft. The ceramic culture, which has a lot of good stories to tell, is attracting more and more listeners, and the ceramic cultural and creative industry with young people as the main force is also bringing more influence to the ancient city.
In the interaction between people and the city, some people record the changes in Jingdezhen, and Jingdezhen also records their growth. Some people are inspired by Jingdezhen, and Jingdezhen is also rich because of them. Some people dream here, and Jingdezhen also shares their energy. The joint efforts of all people, like flowing water, change the appearance of the ancient city little by little.
After discussing what kind of city Jingdezhen is from different angles, which attracts a large number of young people, I asked Jiang Zhihui what kind of place Jingdezhen is not.
He thought about it for a moment and said that Jingdezhen is not a very complicated place. "If you compare it to a person, she doesn't know the world well enough, and her abilities are not enough, but she has her own core things and has been walking at her own pace. Because she is very rare, everyone is willing to protect her. In the past, Jingdezhen was not a very expressive place. Now, though a little jerky, she's starting to want to go to the front desk and tell her own story. ”
Chen Jin and Guo Xiangjie are pseudonyms).
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*: Xinhua Daily Telegraph.
For more content or cooperation, please pay attention to the official WeChat of China Economic Net (ID: ourcecn).