The Hutian Ancient Kiln Site is located in Hutian Village in the suburb of Jingdezhen City, Jiangxi Province.
Jingdezhen of Jiangxi Province is most famous porcelain-making city in China. The porcelain made in Jingdezhen has a color as blue as the sky and as white as jade, and is as bright as mirror, as thin as paper. When knocked, it gives out a sound like that of a chime stone. It is a precious kind of porcelain among the early kinds that got a worldwide reputation. Hence Jingdezhen is reputed as the City of Porcelain in China.
The Hutian Ancient Kiln Site is like a shining pearl among the ancient kilns in Jingdezhen, covering an area of 400,000 square meters. Pottery making in kilns started from the Five Dynasties Period (907-960), developed through the Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1271-1368) Dynasties, and then ended in the mid Ming Dynasty. Relics of the Five Dynasties Period scatter in the east part of the village, and relics of the Song and Yuan Dynasties are distributed in the south, while the Ming relics spread in an area with Pipa Mountain as its center.
Liujiawu and Pipa Mountain have the richest deposit of tools used in making pottery and porcelain shatters, with deposit layer of about a few dozen meters high at the center. Big stoves and workshop sites scatter along both banks of the Tianmen Gouge . Among porcelain wares of the Five Dynasties Period, the most delicate kind is the white glazed ware. The crab-shell green bowl and white glazed plate, made into various shapes, were thin and transparent, with light green glaze and delicate patterns. These were the masterpieces of porcelain at that time. Porcelain wares of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) were mainly decorated with fine patterns and made into beautiful shapes. Wares of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) were mainly black and yellow ones as well as some celadon wares. In the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), porcelain wares in the site were mainly celadon wares used by ordinary civilians.
The Hutian Ancient Kiln Site represents the development of porcelain-making techniques, artistic quality and production scale, and provides important concrete materials for the research into the developing history of Chinese porcelain.