In early February, Hong Yao got the news she’d long been waiting for — her application to open a stall at Taoxichuan, one of China’s most-visited ceramics markets, had finally been approved.

Such an opportunity is a dream for young artists like Hong in Jingdezhen, a smaller city of 1.7 million in the eastern Jiangxi province, which for centuries produced fine china for the Chinese imperial court and is today a global hub for porcelain.

Taoxichuan is regarded second only to the city’s Letian Creative Market in terms of the craftsmanship and experience of its ceramicists, and Hong felt that being accepted — on her fifth time of asking — was a kind of recognition of her work, and represented the promise of a decent income.

“It was a real step up,” says the 24-year-old, who had previously only run stalls at the Sculpture Factory, a lower-quality marketplace where there are few barriers to entry, making it accessible to novices, but the foot traffic is low. “I felt like the whole year ahead would now go smoothly. But I knew I could only celebrate once sales were booming.”

Thriving in this industry is not easy, especially since the arrival of social media, which has had a significant impact on consumers’ tastes and behaviors. One viral photo now has the power to send sales soaring. As a result, many ceramicists have switched from classic styles to more “cute,” photogenic designs, while Jingdezhen’s marketplaces are now filled with areas designed for photographers to encourage “shareable content.”

As this millenia-old ceramics capital changes with the times, young artists must learn to straddle two worlds: being both traditional craftspeople and modern salespeople.

Designs on success

Hong, a native of Jiangxi’s Poyang County, is what’s known as a “Jing drifter.” She arrived in the city to study for three years at a vocational college and never left.

Since her student days, Hong has had a keen interest in blue and white porcelain, a traditional decorative style typically created with cobalt oxide. She started her own studio, creating pieces in this style using large brushes to paint cobalt pigment in water droplets on clay bases. “You can see the sky and ocean in these designs,” she says.

Proud of her work, she decided to display them for sale at a friend’s store, but was devastated when none sold after a month. “Forget Taoxichuan, these wouldn’t even sell at a regular market,” she recalls thinking at the time.

Hong decided to pivot from blue and white porcelain, which is hard, time-consuming work, to making the more cute, creative pieces with dopamine colors — vibrant, energizing hues that stimulate feelings of happiness — that she was increasingly seeing at the higher-end markets. She notes that over half of the stalls at Taoxichuan today display “cute ceramics” to appeal to young women, who make up the majority of visitors, as well as more portable products like fridge magnets.

She began to experiment: three brushstrokes for an apple, five for a tongue emoji, sometimes with the eyes looking in different directions. No realism — cuteness was the priority. She could draw up to 20 of these designs a day using just colored pencils, way faster than traditional methods.

After glazing several pieces and firing them in a kiln, Hong took some photos and shared them on the Chinese lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu, or RedNote. Her account, which previously received little attention, suddenly gained hundreds of likes and even requests for custom designs.

Hong eventually secured her spot at Taoxichuan by submitting images of her doodles on porcelain fridge magnets. To make her stall more photogenic, she bought patterned tablecloths and painted her shelves bright colors. In the first few days, despite the constant rain and it being the off-season for tourists, she earned more than 2,000 yuan ($275).

About 10 sales were made through livestreamers, who regularly circulate the Taoxichuan and Letian markets, visiting various stalls and introducing their products. Eventually, customers began connecting with Hong directly to place orders.

Stall leases at Taoxichuan last only a month, with vendors allowed to set up for a maximum of two days a week. When her month was up, Hong reapplied using the exact same photos as before, but was rejected, leaving her confused. “I’ve never understood the selection criteria for the higher-tier markets,” she says.

Hong had no choice but to rejoin the novices at the Sculpture Factory, where she would sometimes sit for the entire day without seeing a single customer. She decided to delegate the running of the stall to her boyfriend, while she returned to her workshop to focus on designing ceramics.

Finding paradise

While Hong was still struggling to get accepted at Taoxichuan, her friend and fellow ceramicist Jiatu was aiming even higher. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, he was running a stall at the Sculpture Factory, and every Friday he would attend lectures at the Letian Creative Market covering diverse cultural topics such as leaf-rubbing, incense culture, and woodwork.

Despite having only worked in the industry for a year, he’d already twice applied to Taoxichuan, where he’d heard traders could earn more than 10,000 yuan a day. Both times he was rejected.

However, the more time he spent at Letian, the more he became aware of the hierarchy within the local industry. “Taoxichuan is an internet-famous tourist spot for making a quick buck. … The Letian clique looks down on Taoxichuan, scoffing at its excessive commercialization and tasteless offerings,” he says, adding that the highest prices for ceramics at Letian are 10 times those of Taoxichuan.

There’s no official data to compare the incomes of ceramicists across the city’s markets, but it’s widely accepted among the locals that approval from Taoxichuan means profits, while approval from Letian means prestige.

In 2023, Jiatu quit his job in real estate, sold his home in Shenyang, capital of the northeastern Liaoning province, and migrated south to Jingdezhen to study ceramics at a training school where Hong was working as a teaching assistant. He recalls that the classrooms were packed almost every day, “as if limited sneakers were being sold and people had to fight for a spot.”

Because of the city’s celebrity status — not only as a porcelain production base but increasingly as a hotspot for tourists, lifestyle influencers, and drifters — the demand was huge, with the school having to double its number of potter’s wheels to 20. Hong sometimes had to teach up to 15 students a day. Most took short courses lasting three to five days, learning how to roll and throw the clay, and shape various pieces.

Jiatu estimates that one-third of students were from overseas or mothers “seeking therapy through ceramics,” one-third were art majors specializing in sculpture or painting who wanted to expand their skill sets, and the rest were people like him looking to start new lives in Jingdezhen. He summarises this third category as bank tellers, teachers, and others with “socially respectable, parent-approved, ‘iron rice bowl’ jobs” who had discovered they were “freedom-seeking souls in moribund bodies.”

During his three months at the school, Jiatu shared a co-ed dormitory with Hong and several others. They would dine together and go on early-morning hikes, eventually becoming a tight-knit group.

Jiatu constantly mined Hong for advice, gaining essential knowledge such as keeping grumpy kiln operators on side with the occasional bottle of baijiu, the strong Chinese liquor, and using the local dialect in stores to avoid paying higher prices for paints, clay, and other art supplies.

By the end of the year, Hong had had enough of teaching, especially dealing with “sensitive students” and their mothers. As Jiatu’s course was also coming to an end, they along with a third partner decided to rent a two-story, 200-square-meter building in the city’s old factory area and open their own workshop.

Life was relaxed for a while. In the afternoons, they’d make and mend ceramics before heading downtown to grab dinner. Sometimes they’d bring alcohol up the mountain and drink until sunrise.

The business was earning them about 4,000 yuan a month, enough to cover basic daily expenses, and Jiatu felt that he’d reached utopia. But it wasn’t to last.

Selling out?

Suddenly, in May last year, ceramics at the Sculpture Factory stopped selling.

Jiatu began noticing a change at the start of the month, during the Labor Day holiday. As he rode his electric-powered bike to open his stall, he passed dozens of vendors in alleyways and on the roadside hawking factory-made porcelain products from the northern Shanxi province and eastern Fujian province.

Prices were rock bottom. For example, a set of four large, mass-produced bowls was just 25 yuan, compared with 200 yuan for just one of Jiatu’s handcrafted bowls. Tourists were naturally snapping up the cheaper options.

Initially, Jiatu believed the merchants were merely opportunistic outsiders looking to capitalize on the surge in visitors that Jingdezhen sees during holidays (the city received just over 39 million tourists in 2024). But the vendors were, in fact, retired locals and their relatives. Labor Day came and went, but this streetside trade remained.

Soon, unauthorized stalls lined the roads downtown as well as those surrounding Taoxichuan and the Sculpture Factory, which by the summer was receiving 900 applications for just 150 available spots, up from the previous average of 300.

Jiatu says ceramicists became locked in a race to the bottom, as they slashed the prices of their cups, plates, and bowls, and began to consider an income of just 100 yuan a day as acceptable. Some were earning nothing at all.

Hong reduced her prices by 20 yuan — any lower and she feared that she’d alienate her regular customers. “Plus, once you decide to cut your prices, it can be hard to raise them again,” she explains. For her and other young ceramicists, the situation left them with a dilemma: Do they want to be craftspeople or merchants?

For Hong, the goal now is to make designs that sell. For instance, after several tourists mistook her tongue emoji design for a small dog, she took that to mean people like pet designs, so she began crafting dog figurines, priced at 39 yuan each.

Together with her boyfriend, Hong today earns about 7,000 yuan a month, while their expenses run to more than 4,000 yuan. Her life is still relatively relaxed: She spends each day at the workshop after lunch, plays mahjong with friends in the evenings, and watches TV dramas at home until 2 a.m. Her biggest motivator is to have money to travel. “It would be amazing if I could save more than 10,000 yuan a month,” she says.

However, Jiatu refuses to see himself as a merchant. He told Hong he still wanted to be an artist creating ceramics in the Japanese wabi-sabi style, which emphasizes imperfection and simplicity. While less “cute,” it aligned more with his aesthetic preferences, and he felt there was a balance to be struck between craftsmanship and mass appeal.

When he arrived in Jingdezhen, he’d just sold a 100-square-meter apartment in Shenyang and had hundreds of thousands of yuan in savings, “so I was prepared to go a long time without an income.” In his second year in the city, that confidence began to slip. Not only were the mass-produced ceramics affecting the market, but his efforts to share with his friends what he was learning from the weekly Letian lectures appeared to be falling on deaf ears. They just didn’t want to know, he says.

Everyone in their workshop was pushing hard to increase sales, but massive amounts of clay were being wasted on failed designs, and the glaze-spraying machines were breaking from overwork. Eventually, at the end of October, Hong, Jiatu, and their business partner decided to go their separate ways.

Not long after, Jiatu hosted his first livestream. His online sales now far outstrip the 3,000 yuan a month he was earning from the physical stall at the Sculpture Factory. “After gaining traction online, artists no longer need to care about Taoxichuan or Letian,” he says, adding that the hierarchy of the local markets is largely irrelevant in the world of livestream marketing.

His daily routine now involves setting up his stall at the Sculpture Factory, choosing which products to showcase, and then launching his livestream on Xiaohongshu, where viewers can find links to make orders. He’s learned to talk fast and hit all the major selling points, and will sometimes send private messages to regular customers asking them to help hype his products in the live room.

“I’m a semi-merchant these days,” says Jiatu. “The only difference between me and a pure merchant is that I still like ceramics.”

Reported by Zhu Dingding.

A version of this article originally appeared in White Night Workshop. It has been translated and edited for brevity and clarity, and is republished here with permission.

Translator: Vincent Chow; editors: Wang Juyi and Hao Qibao.

(Header image: An artist works at her stall at Taoxichuan, Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, March 2025. Shi Weiming/VCG)