Jingdezhen has been making porcelain for more than a thousand years, and the Hutian kiln site is one of the places where that story began to turn into an industry. The kilns here produced fine white and bluish-white ware in the Song and Yuan dynasties, and the heaps of broken shards and the remains of long dragon-shaped kilns show how potters adapted slopes of land to fire great quantities of pots at once. Later, in the Ming dynasty, imperial kilns were established in the town itself, and Jingdezhen became the porcelain capital of China, supplying emperors and, via the sea trade, markets from Japan to Europe.
The raw materials came from the hills nearby. The clay called kaolin takes its name from Gaoling, a mountain near Jingdezhen, and the word travelled west with the porcelain trade, eventually becoming a standard term in geology and ceramics. Together with petuntse, a feldspar-rich stone, kaolin gave Chinese potters a white, hard, translucent body that Europe could not copy until the eighteenth century. Wood from the surrounding forests fuelled the kilns, and the rivers carried the finished goods down to the Yangtze.
For a rider, northern Jiangxi is green, hilly, humid country with winding rivers, tea terraces and bamboo thickets. Roads are generally good, with a mixture of expressways and quieter country routes, though motorcycle rules in China are strict: foreign visitors usually cannot ride without a Chinese licence and registration, so check your options before planning, and note that many cities restrict motorbikes. The climate has hot, wet summers and cool, damp winters, so spring and autumn are the pleasant seasons. Rain can come down hard, and the hills fill with mist.
Jingdezhen, only about four kilometres from the site, is a city of over three hundred thousand with plenty of fuel, restaurants and hotels. Visit the porcelain markets and the working potteries, where you can watch painters, throwers and glazers at their trades, and eat a bowl of noodles with local vegetables and chillies. Take time to look closely at the shards on the ground, since each one is a piece of a vanished cargo, and leave them where you found them.