Every day, visitors from around the world flock to museums to see some of the most beautiful porcelain the world has ever known.

 

Few, however, realize that many china tea set collections come from a small, rarely visited town called Jingdezhen.

Excavations show that the earliest pure china tea sets were made in Jingdezhen. Artisans started making porcelain items here over 1,700 years ago, when much of the rest of the world was only making bland pottery vessels.

 

People quickly found porcelain Chinese tea sets to be much more beautiful, more valuable, and more durable than older kinds of pottery.

 

Chinese tea sets from this town became such a hit in the 16th century that a piece of Jingdezhen porcelain was worth more than its weight in gold.

If you visit Jingdezhen today, you can see that china tea set production is still being carried out in the traditional manner. Miners use shovels to mine in tunnels, and workers sift through all the clay by hand.

 

Even the transferring the clay from one place to another is done with pure muscle. Artisans handcraft and hand-paint many of the pieces, which are then fired in old-style kilns entirely made of clay and bricks.

Locals here still tell a beautiful story about the town. One day, a goddess came to visit. She was amazed by its scenery, and couldn’t resist taking a bath in the river flowing by. As soon as she found a young man peeking, she hurried to fly away. Due to such haste, she forgot her scarf. The scarf then became a waterfall in the river. You can see the waterfall when you visit the town today.

Jingdezhen china tea sets have some of the most sought-after qualities in fine china. The clay found here is some of the purest white clay in the world, and a hard, bright glaze that shines beautifully is used to finish every piece.

Also, Jingdezhen items are known to be paper thin to the touch, because the clay is very solid and allows potters to create delicate pieces that would fall apart if they used any other material. What’s more, you can even strike a piece of Jingdezhen porcelain to hear a pleasant chiming sound.

These qualities cannot be duplicated: not only is the pure white clay unique to Jingdezhen, but also it takes thousand-year-old techniques to craft a single Jingdezhen Chinese tea set. A tiny mistake during the process could ruin weeks of work and months of income.

 

These techniques take a master potter a lifetime to learn and perfect.

No wonder European potters tried for centuries to duplicate the secrets of the fine Jingdezhen porcelain, but to no avail. And Chinese emperors once chose the town to build their imperial kilns.

 

Today, Chinese people reserve Jingdezhen china tea sets only for the most important occasions.