Kiln it — porcelain hub pulls foreign artists

And yet, to speak of Jingdezhen as if it were only now becoming international would be to miss something essential.

The city has carried that quality for centuries.

"When you look at the blue and white, that is not all Chinese," he said. "That's influenced by the Middle East and Europe. So Jingdezhen is a nice mirror reflection of how internationalism can be embraced on all sides," said Read.

History bears that out.

American historian Robert Finlay, author of The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History, has been cited as stating that Jingdezhen porcelain in the 16th century helped trigger the first wave of globalization in human history.

Along major maritime routes linking Asia, Africa, Europe and later the Americas, porcelain moved outward from China carrying not only goods, but also tastes, technologies and ways of seeing.

UNESCO has likewise noted that for hundreds of years, ceramics from Jingdezhen traveled over land and sea along the Silk Road, serving as a medium of cultural and commercial exchange between the East and West.

Fang Lili, a scholar at the China National Academy of Arts and a distinguished chief professor at Southeast University, said the city's global character is not an added layer, but something embedded in its making.

Jingdezhen, she said, entered overseas markets on a large scale as early as the Song Dynasty (960-1279). During the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), Persian and Arab merchants came to China for trade.

Later, with the establishment of the imperial kilns in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, the city became increasingly industrialized, drawing large numbers of farmers into urban craft production and growing beyond the scale of a merely local center.