Difficulty: Summiteer (Level 3)
Chinese porcelain artist Chen Qing has one vivid memory of her grandfather. She remembers the only time he wrote down the formula for her family’s distinctive red pigment.
Chen’s grandfather asked her mother to memorise it. Then, minutes later, he burned the paper. The secret has since been passed down only by word of mouth from one generation to the next.
Her family has made porcelain in Jingdezhen since around 1860. The city is in China’s central Jiangxi province.
Jingdezhen is known as China’s porcelain capital. Its pottery-making history spans more than 2,000 years. It began during the Han dynasty. The city’s porcelain sites were added to Unesco’s World Heritage List in 2026.
Jingdezhen’s artists have maintained techniques that were once used to make porcelain for the imperial court. Chen’s ancestors adopted some of those traditions after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, which ended the monarchy.
