Jingdezhen Traditional Colored-Glaze Porcelain Firing Technique

Colored-glaze porcelain is one of Jingdezhen's four famous wares, using various metal oxides as colorants to fire a rich range of glaze colors—red, green, blue, black—at high temperature. Its lineage traces back to the shadow-blue (yingqing) glaze pioneered at Jingdezhen in the Song dynasty and has developed ever since; it is recognized as a provincial ICH of Jiangxi.

Masters mix glazes by formula and control the relationship between coloring metals and the kiln's atmosphere and temperature—red like flame, green like spring water, blue like the sky, black like ink-charcoal—with firing so difficult that yields are low. The high-fired copper red known as 'China Red' is especially prized, and national representative inheritor Deng Xiping has devoted her career to researching and reviving colored glazes.

Colored glaze forms a lineage of its own through the pure beauty of glaze color, hailed as the most mysterious of porcelain arts; together with blue-and-white, rice-grain and famille-rose it makes up Jingdezhen's four famous wares and is the branch of the porcelain craft that most tests mastery of the fire.

The China Ceramics Museum holds and displays fine colored-glaze wares from across the dynasties, making it a good place to understand this branch.