'Skillcations' enrich holiday experiences

Chen Cong had planned to spend her holidays in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, wandering between kiln sites and ceramic markets.

Then it rained for days. Not keen on traipsing from one soggy kiln to the next under an umbrella, the office worker from Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, signed up for a five-day ceramic-making course instead.

She had no idea this one decision would lead her to a new passion and a rethink of how she spends her money and holidays.

For five days, her mornings were spent learning wheel-throwing, hand-building, underglaze painting and glazing. Afternoons were for free creation or for browsing glaze and clay shops with classmates, learning about slips, colored glazes and kiln transmutations, and observing how different clays fire. In the evenings, she wandered the local ceramic markets for inspiration.

"Pottery takes time. It's not something you can experience in just a short hour," she said, adding that Jingdezhen's five-day course offered an immersive learning experience.

"As the birthplace of ceramics, Jingdezhen has a very good learning environment, with plenty of public kilns, clay shops and a dazzling variety of glaze shops," Chen said.

Chen returned to Hangzhou with several pieces she had made, some to keep and some to give as gifts to colleagues and friends.

Having hands-on experience of turning a lump of clay into a fine piece of porcelain greatly reduced her desire to buy new things.

"Now when something at home breaks, I think about whether I can fix it myself," Chen said.

The Jingdezhen stay also helped her find her own hobby — underglaze painting.

She took home underglaze pigments and bisque wares, onto which she copies Chinese paintings in her spare time.

Recently she returned to Jingdezhen for a weekend to have them fired.

Vacations centered around learning a skill while exploring a destination, or "skillcations", have become one of the biggest travel trends in the country.

According to a report by lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu on the interest-driven travel trend, searches for experiential activities such as crafts, heritage sites and the outdoors grew 48 percent quarter-on-quarter as of September.

Besides Jingdezhen, other cities have also become popular skillcation destinations: Dali in Yunnan province offers visitors the chance to learn the tie-dye craft of the Bai ethnic group; She county in Anhui province is where visitors can experience gold tracing and Huizhou inkstick manufacturing at local factories; and Suzhou in Jiangsu province is where people can learn Suzhou embroidery.

"I was already doing skillcation before the word was invented," said Liu Yuxi, a 27-year-old from Shenzhen, Guangdong province, who learned surfing while vacationing in Hainan province, Muay Thai in Thailand and diving in Vietnam.

"Learning a new skill while on vacation is a way to enrich my travel experience," she said.

She often travels to foreign countries, where she meets peers from various countries in youth hostels, many of whom have a skill to show off.

"I even met a Spanish man who could perform Wing Chun moves and forms," Liu said, referring to a southern Chinese kung fu style.

That inspired her to learn a skill that represented her own culture.

Last year, she traveled to Foshan, Guangdong, to learn Wing Chun. After studying for a while, she realized that learning the traditional martial art was a dry and slow process.

"It's something you should never expect to master quickly," she said.

Liu found the repetitive daily practice of polishing forms similar to "inner observation", which gradually freed her from restlessness and made her more grounded.

She has now been in Foshan for more than a year, and sometimes, because of her good English, she teaches trial classes to foreign tourists.

"I've found that this is no longer just a hobby, but something I want to learn long-term and pass on," she said.

She records her daily martial arts practice on video, edits it into vlogs and posts them on social media.

"Now newcomers at the gym say they became interested in Wing Chun because they saw my videos," she said.

Liu has bought a lifetime membership card for 8,000 yuan ($1,200) at a local Wing Chun gym in Foshan.

"Now I plan to have the longest skillcation of my life in Foshan," she said.