Tracing clan genealogies transforms conservation into an emotional connection

When Wei Qing and his team drafted the application seeking UNESCO World Heritage status for Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, in 2023, they soon realized that the city's ceramic legacy could not be told through kilns and workshops in downtown Jingdezhen alone.

The story, they realized, can also be found across the surrounding hills, in the pine forests that fueled the kilns, the kaolin (Gaoling) deposits that strengthened porcelain, and the porcelain stone quarries that provided the foundational materials. This network, now mostly hidden deep in the mountains, once formed an intricate industrial chain that supported Jingdezhen's porcelain supremacy for centuries.

On Saturday, it became a newly minted UNESCO World Heritage site, turning the spotlight on the components that made this millennium-long achievement possible — not just the finished porcelain, but its raw materials and fuel.

"They constitute an integrated industrial production system centered on the area's porcelain production center and stretching far across the surrounding mountains, which is a sophisticated model of regional resource allocation," says Wei.