JINGDEZHEN, CHINA / ACCESS Newswire / October 24, 2026 / China News Service (CNS) issued a media report on Friday to promote the 2026 China Jingdezhen International Ceramic Expo held recently in the porcelain-making city of central China’s Jiangxi Province.
Over more than 1,000 years of porcelain-making, Jingdezhen has become virtually synonymous with Chinese ceramics. But the story of Chinese porcelain, its evolution and its journey to the wider world, was never the one-way flow that many may assume, said the report.
The 2026 China Jingdezhen International Ceramic Expo, held alongside the forum, drew more than 2,500 guests from over 90 countries and regions, 450 domestic and foreign companies and over 40 international brands, with nearly 100 overseas buyers and more than 150 domestic suppliers taking part in trade talks.
It is the city’s first major international gathering since “Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites” was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in July this year as China’s 61st World Heritage property, the report added.
Young designers at the expo fused plush-toy elements with blue-and-white porcelain, turning classic ceramics into cuddly collectible dolls, with artificial intelligence adding a tech edge to the trendy playthings.
Exhibitors also showcased ceramic 3D printers that marry traditional pottery with additive manufacturing: users type in a prompt or upload an image, AI generates the model, the printer produces the ceramic blank, and kiln-firing turns it into a finished piece.
Jingdezhen is home not only to the “jingpiao,” Chinese migrants who have moved there to pursue ceramics, but also to the “yang jingpiao,” or foreign “jingpiao.”
According to the report, about 60,000 people now make up Jingdezhen’s migrant ceramics community, and at its peak the number of foreign ceramics practitioners reached roughly 5,000.
Jingdezhen’s vitality lies not only in kilns that have never gone cold, but in every generation relighting them in new ways, the CNS report highlighted.
In 2025, the city’s ceramics industry posted total output exceeding 102.7 billion yuan (about 14.4 billion U.S. dollars), making it China’s first single ceramics industry cluster to top the 100-billion-yuan mark. Advanced ceramics accounted for 34 percent of that output, up from less than 10 percent five years earlier.
Traditional ceramics use natural clay, quartz and feldspar, transformed from mud to vessel by kiln fire and handcraft. Advanced ceramics are different: made from high-purity synthetic oxide, nitride and carbide powders, precision-moulded and sintered at high temperatures, they offer resistance to heat, wear and corrosion, along with high hardness, electrical insulation and thermal conductivity, properties that are used in electronic components, equipment manufacturing, new energy and biomedicine.
The two sit on entirely different scales in terms of raw materials, process precision and performance requirements, the report pointed out.
In recent years, the number of advanced ceramics companies in Jingdezhen has grown from 86 to 208, and key materials such as high-purity nano alumina and zirconia ceramic substrates have reached leading domestic standards.
In this city born of, and built on, porcelain, an industrial transformation is under way. From ornaments to critical components in precision instruments, Jingdezhen’s ceramics are moving into the supply chains of the electronics, equipment and materials industries, the report said.
From a single piece of porcelain to a whole industry chain, from millennia-old kiln fires to a 100-billion-yuan cluster, Jingdezhen’s story has never belonged to the past alone, the CNS report said, noting that the historical depth of China’s “porcelain capital” has been converted into the density of its innovation, creativity that crosses borders and generations, and keeps reaching new horizons.
Contact Information:
Organization: China News Service
Contact Person: Mr. Wei Zang
Phone Number：+8615982225939
Email: Liyujiao@chinanews.com.cn
zangwei@Chinanews.com.cn
Website: www.chinanews.com
Report Link: https://www.chinanews.com.cn/cj/2026/10-18/10716736.shtml
SOURCE: China News Service
View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire
