We will surely see a nomination and subsequent inscription of Jingdezhen in the coming years. Chinese porcelain was a major global export product and Jingdezhen was the undoubted primary location for its production from the 14th century onwards.

For those who want to visit the site already, there’s always the tricky task of deciding which possible location to go to. It seems likely that this will become a serial nomination with all things related to the porcelain history of Jingdezhen scattered around town. There is a kiln site outside of the city center called Hutian, there is the Jingdezhen Ceramics Folk Museum which Zoë described in her review, and there is the Imperial Kiln Site (a.k.a. Yuyaochang Relic Site) right in the commercial heart of the city.

I visited the latter, which seems to have been geared to bigger plans already. It checks all the boxes of a Chinese archeological WHS:

• Grand entrance.
• An iconic and modern museum building designed by a renowned architecture firm (Studio Zhu Pei).
• An ‘Old Street’ filled with souvenir shops and coffee/tea bars.
• Some important-looking excavations under a protective cover (not necessarily holding original remains)

What it lacks though is good on-site interpretation: there’s a few QR-codes to scan that will tell you something about an individual object, but the overall picture and a clear narrative are missing. So I had to get the story via the info I found online. At this location, porcelain was produced for the imperial family during the Ming and Qing dynasties (14th to early 20th centuries). In addition to the remains of workshops and kilns, there is also a quarter that housed the craftsmen and which held trade association guild halls. With its sober brick buildings, this part of the site looks a bit like a 19th-century industrial town in England or Belgium.

I just strolled around for a bit like the rest of the considerable number of visitors, who merely seemed to use it as a park. On a hill, there’s the Longzhu Pavillion which attracts the selfie crowd, but its porcelain-related use was lost to me. Inside I found the only three Chinese porcelain vases that are currently on show to the public. There are probably more of them at the adjacent modern museum – but I couldn’t get in! It seems that you have to pre-book your ticket online (it is not covered by the 53 yuan general entrance fee to the site although it lies within its grounds).