The 2026 Jingdezhen Forum opened in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, on 19 October, drawing more than 300 diplomats, city officials, scholars and craft inheritors from 25 countries to a programme titled World Heritage and Dialogue of Civilisations. Three months earlier, in July, the city’s handmade porcelain industrial heritage had been inscribed on the World Heritage List, filling the list’s long-empty porcelain category. A European delegation of museum directors arrived two days later.
| Dates | Forum 19 October 2026; museum directors’ visit 20 to 21 October 2026 |
| Venue | Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province |
| What It Is | An international forum on heritage protection and cross-cultural dialogue, paired with museum-to-museum matchmaking and an academic session |
| Scale | 25 countries; 300-plus diplomats, city representatives, scholars and inheritors |
| Milestone | July 2026 inscription of the Jingdezhen handmade porcelain industrial heritage |
| Output | A Jingdezhen Initiative proposing a standing liaison mechanism among world heritage sites |
Blue That Travelled Both Ways
Most persuasive were the scenes that took place outside the meeting hall. At the Hutian kiln site, the delegation from Talavera de la Reina noticed that the blue in Spanish traditional ceramics sits remarkably close to the cobalt of Jingdezhen blue-and-white, and one Spanish ceramicist found a pattern on a Yuan dynasty shard almost identical to a motif she uses. Fernando Portela García, a historian attached to the Spanish city’s ceramics heritage programme, said the site worked like a cultural mirror, and that the two traditions turned out to be less distant than he had assumed.
Ahmet Kaya, deputy mayor of İznik, added a second case. The Turkish city, known for the tiles that cover its streets and buildings, carries Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman layers in the same way Jingdezhen carries its kiln history, and he argued that protection is never one city’s private business. İznik and Jingdezhen are now preparing a joint programme for young people, with the intention of carrying practices learned in Jiangxi back to Turkey.
What the Directors Came For
The delegation on 20 and 21 October came from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Britain. In a roundtable on museum-to-museum pairing, the group worked with intermediaries and a national heritage administration channel known as the Bridge Plan to open routes for exhibitions, artist residencies and licensed product development. The concrete result was modest and specific: contacts exchanged, an agreement to keep meeting online, and detailed talks on particular exhibition themes. Their route ran through the Taoyangli historic district, the China Ceramics Museum, the Folk Kiln Museum, the Industrial Heritage Museum and the Imperial Kiln Museum.
Daniela Eberli, director of the Hetjens Museum in Düsseldorf, took over a gallery at the Imperial Kiln Museum and lectured her colleagues on the Chenghua doucai chicken cup and on a three-colour duck-shaped incense burner, nicknamed Suisui Ya, that has gone from buried fragments to repair to a following abroad. On her third visit, she located the city’s distinction in the coexistence of a traditional root, industrial remains and contemporary studios, with the ancient ceramic gene bank acting as the bridge. Chiara Squarcina of Venice’s civic museums foundation set the two cities side by side: Venice grew from its lagoon, Jingdezhen grew along the Changjiang river, and each river fed a civilisation.
A closing session produced the Jingdezhen Initiative, answered by Talavera de la Reina, İznik and the Western Xia imperial tombs site in Ningxia, among others. It asks signatories to treat living transformation as part of protection and to build a standing liaison mechanism covering training, research and digital conversion. The substance is a shift of channel: Chinese ceramics have mostly gone abroad through fairs and sales, while museum pairing and residencies move the contact to the research and display side, where the narrative is written.
A Gene Bank and a Generation Gap
Two structural problems got an airing. On the technical side, Jingdezhen has built what it describes as the world’s first ancient ceramic gene bank, holding digital records for 20 million shards, and the 2026 international ceramics expo that ran alongside the forum released a digital transformation plan summarised as one map and four lists. Tony Brown, a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, showed how 3D printing is being used in restoration, arguing that digitisation makes a working relationship between past and present feasible rather than merely representable.
Generational renewal is less tractable. Ángela Delgado Pañagua, the Talavera councillor responsible for crafts and tourism, stated that young people there are steadily less willing to take up pottery. Kevin Recuero López, a young Spanish ceramicist, recalled opening a children’s workshop with his wife last year, running weekly sessions in throwing and painting. “Children have to meet ceramic culture early if the spirit of the craft is going to carry on,” he said. Jingdezhen’s answer is density: more than 3,400 recognised inheritors, 100,000 young creatives, and Taoxichuan, a cultural district converted from old porcelain factories where over 30,000 makers with an average age of 28 now work. Chen Kelong, the city’s party secretary, put the mechanism ahead of the ceremony when he remarked that a kiln fire lasts only if someone keeps adding wood.
