Jingdezhen’s Porcelain Sites Join the UNESCO World Heritage List
Inscribed in Busan in July 2026, the Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites cover kilns, kaolin mines and river docks from the 10th to the 19th century. It is China's 61st World Heritage site.
The World Heritage Committee, meeting in Busan from 19 to 29 July 2026, inscribed the Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List. It is China’s 61st World Heritage property and the first to describe a complete pre-industrial manufacturing system for a single product: porcelain.
What is inscribed
The property is not a single monument. It covers 1,979 hectares in and around the city of Jingdezhen, in Jiangxi Province, with a buffer zone of more than 5,500 hectares. It is organised in five component areas, 15 groups of remains and 45 individual heritage points, which together follow the path of a porcelain bowl from raw material to export.
The production centre includes the Imperial Kiln site in the old town, where porcelain was made for the Ming and Qing courts, along with the Luomachang and Guanyinge kiln sites. The raw-material areas include the Gaoling mine, the hill that gave kaolin its name in every European language, and the porcelain-stone mines of Changling and Dawukeli. The property also takes in a woodland area that supplied firewood for the kilns, and the docks and land routes along the Chang River from which finished pieces left for Poyang Lake, the Yangtze and the sea.
The remains date from the 10th to the 19th century. UNESCO’s evaluation notes that from the 16th century Jingdezhen was the centre of the world’s handmade porcelain production. The blue-and-white ware that filled European and Middle Eastern collections came from here.
A working city
Jingdezhen is not an archaeological park. Around 100,000 people in the city still work in ceramics, and the traditional sequence of 72 steps, each once the task of a different specialist, is still practised in workshops. In recent years the city has drawn young ceramicists from across China and from more than 60 countries, and its weekend markets have become a destination in their own right.
Visiting
The natural starting point is the Imperial Kiln site and the Imperial Kiln Museum beside it, whose brick vaults by architect Zhu Pei take their form from the city’s old kilns. The Gaoling mine and the village of Yaoli are a day trip into the hills to the north-east. Jingdezhen has its own airport and a high-speed rail station, with trains from Shanghai and Hangzhou taking roughly three to four hours.
The inscription extends a recent series of Chinese sites linked to craft and trade rather than to imperial architecture, after Quanzhou in 2021 and the tea forests of Jingmai Mountain in 2023.