When President Xi Jinping visited Jingdezhen in 2023, he toured kiln ruins, a ceramic museum and ancient ceramic workshops in the Taoyangli Historical and Cultural District.

　　Xi labeled ceramics as a Chinese treasure and an important calling card of Chinese civilization. He called for a stronger ceramics industry and for the millennium-old porcelain capital to shine even brighter.

　　Now that heritage is being renewed through people. An old saying held that a finished piece could pass through 72 hands — shorthand for 72 main procedures, traditionally divided among specialists who each mastered a single skillset.

　　An artisan makes porcelain at an old workshop near the Imperial Kiln Site in June. ZHU XINGXIN/CHINA DAILY

　　At a porcelain workshop in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, a craftsman carries a pale, freshly shaped vessel toward a kiln. Across the city, young visitors bend over potter"s wheels trying to mold wet clay into cups of their own. Clay links the similar, yet distinct scenes: one is rooted in skills honed and passed down over centuries, the other is driven by a new generation eager to learn.

　　Jingdezhen, known as China"s "porcelain capital", has more than 2,000 years of pottery-making history and over 1,000 years of imperial-kiln production. By the 16th century, it had become the center of the world"s handicraft porcelain industry.

　　Its wares have traveled to courts and homes worldwide, carrying Chinese techniques and aesthetics far beyond the city limits. For years, porcelain shaped global trade, linking China with the wider world.