Four museums across Jiangxi and Fujian have joined forces for "Splendid Needlework", a special exhibition of traditional embroidered textiles now on view in the temporary gallery of the Jizhou Kiln Museum. Opened to mark the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China and to deepen museum exchange between the two provinces, the show runs from July 1 to September 30, 2026, inviting visitors to an appointment of needle and thread.
The exhibition is organized by the Ji'an County Culture, Radio, Television and Tourism Bureau together with the culture and tourism bureaus of Pingnan County, Gutian County and Zherong County, and co-hosted by the Jizhou Kiln Museum and the museums of Pingnan, Gutian and Zherong. It opened on the cultural square of the Jizhou Kiln Museum and brings together fine embroidery from both provinces, interpreting a shared cultural lineage across the Jiangxi-Fujian border. Inside the gallery, stitch by fine stitch, the pieces carry a quiet depth of years. In Jiangxi and Fujian alike, embroidery has long been a kind of record-keeping by women's hands: family stories, regional motifs and passed-down stitches worked into cloth over generations.
The museum describes embroidery as living history stored in needle and thread, a craft lineage flowing through more than a millennium. To serve visitors who cannot come in person, selected works are also shown online. Among them: a brick-red Yuanlingpao (圆领袍) robe bearing mixed-treasure motifs, four-direction Ruyi clouds and a five-claw dragon pattern; a ceremonial gunfu robe with four dragon roundels worked in Panjin embroidery (盘金绣); a black embroidered tiger-head cap trimmed with a brass tiger-head plaque and hanging bells; a multi-color embroidered cloth shawl patterned with flowers and birds; and series of embroidered tiger-head caps and children's caps, embroidered belly bands, embroidered pouches (荷包), and cloud-shoulder capelets and bib sets. The motifs cross the whole span of traditional symbolism — dragons and auspicious clouds for rank and fortune, flowers and birds for vitality — while the tiger-head caps and baby bibs show embroidery at work in the most everyday corners of family life.
The Jizhou Kiln itself is a heavyweight of Chinese ceramic history. Active from the Five Dynasties through the Song and Yuan dynasties, it ranked among the great folk kilns of Jiangxi and is celebrated above all for its black-glazed tea bowls and its signature wood-leaf bowl, in which a real leaf is fired into the glaze as a permanent pattern. The museum on the Yonghe Town site preserves the ancient kiln remains and carries the craft lineage forward; staging a cross-provincial embroidery show on such ground places needlework and ceramics — two living heritage traditions — side by side.
Alongside the show, the museum has extended its summer opening hours. From July 1 to August 31, 2026, the daily visiting window runs from 8:50 to 17:30, later than the usual 8:50–17:00. The Jizhou Kiln Museum sits in Yonghe Town, Ji'an County, Ji'an City, Jiangxi Province, and is a themed museum built around the Jizhou Kiln site, one of the great Song-dynasty ceramic centers. The cross-provincial joint exhibition marks a concrete step in Jiangxi-Fujian museum cooperation.
