I WOUND UP IN JINGDEZHEN BY ACCIDENT. WHILE ON A long weekend trip with some friends to Huangshan, declared by Ming dynasty scholar Xu Xia Ke (same Xu as my Hsu) as a mountain without peer and where the SMIC vice-president had nearly died of a heart attack, I looked on a map and saw that Jingdezhen was less than one hundred miles away. Having heard so many people talk about it in fantastical terms, and having felt their disapproval when I told them I had not yet visited, it seemed only right to take the short train ride to the origin of my great-great-grandfather’s porcelain. I left my friends at some hot springs midmountain and hailed a taxi to the train station.

We sped past jagged peaks and long tunnels, the only car on the highway, which the driver said was new and greatly reduced travel times to and from the mountain. At the train station, map vendors, restaurant hawkers, and pedicab drivers accosted me as soon as I exited the taxi. I fended them off and bought some fruit and a dan bing, a spring onion crepe fried with a beaten egg, from one of the food stalls on the square. Though the station was located in Huangshan, most of the storefronts around the plaza claimed to be in Tunxi, and I asked the proprietor about the discrepancy.

“Less than ten years ago this town was called Tunxi,” he said. “But someone in the provincial government decided to change it to Huangshan. They wanted more tourists, and Huangshan is much more recognizable.”

I spent the train ride facing a thin, manic young man with a spiky haircut talking nonstop to his seatmate, a placable man in his forties or fifties who looked to be an uncle or workmate. The younger guy’s speech was drenched in ma des, a filler word equivalent to fuckin’, as in, “That fuckin’ bitch at the fuckin’ train station was getting on my fuckin’ nerves, so I told her to fuckin’ shut up.” The young guy asked what I was doing on the train and how much I’d paid for my ticket.

“Twenty-five kuai,” I said, using the monetary term with a meaning similar to “bucks.” About $3.50.

“That’s a fuckin’ lot,” he said. “Too fuckin’ much.”

The train pulled into Jingdezhen past midnight. I followed the passengers out of the station, where they seemed to evaporate into the hazy night. I crossed the deserted street to look for the hotel that I had booked last minute from Huangshan, selected for its proximity to the train station. A woman appeared from an unlit doorway. “I’ve got girls, mister, very young, very beautiful,” she said. “Seventeen years old.”

THE NEXT MORNING I rode the elevator to the lobby of the Ban-dao International Hotel, some attempt to build business-class accommodations for businessmen who never came. The receptionist and security guard were the same as the night before; when I entered, they were chatting about where they dreamed of traveling (she, New York and Paris, and he, Tibet) while a bat circled overhead. The only signs of porcelain were the two tall vases lurking behind high-backed chairs in opposite corners of the lobby.

I had a backpack full of dirty clothes and a phone number for something called the Pottery Workshop, which a gallerist in Shanghai had given me. If I wanted to know about Jingdezhen and porcelain, the gallerist said, the Pottery Workshop was a good place to start. But the hotel employees didn’t recognize the Pottery Workshop, and I didn’t know what it was called in Chinese, so I decided to walk to People’s Square, which formed the center of many Chinese cities.

The hotel doormen argued over the best way to get there. “My way is faster,” one said.

“His way exposes you to the sun the entire time,” the other said. “My way has trees.”

I took the second doorman’s advice. Though Jingdezhen lies about fifty miles south of the Yangtze River, its hot and humid summer climate shared the same characteristics as the trio of river valley cities—Chongqing, Wuhan, and Nanjing—that earned themselves the moniker of China’s “Three Furnaces.” I walked north through the sopping heat along a shaded street of small storefronts, including scooter retailers, restaurants, fruit stalls, and two sex-toy shops. For a city synonymous with one of China’s most beautiful creations, Jingdezhen wasn’t much to look at, a third- or fourth-tier city in a poor province. The architecture consisted of monotonous variations on a cube, often clad in sanitary tiles caked with water stains and dirt. The refuse on the streets, the dust and smog and sweat choking the air, and the traffic noise made Shanghai seem like Switzerland. One of the few attempts at beautification were the streetlights and the crosswalk signals encased in columns of blue and white porcelain. At the southern edge of People’s Square loomed a Walmart the size of a football stadium.

Across the street from the Walmart, construction crews worked to clear an equally monstrous tract of land next to an open-air ceramics market and a shopping mall, each stall offering the same cheap, decaled vases, dinnerware, and tea sets. It was difficult to overstate just how ugly it all was, loud colors and clashing styles as unsubtle as their surroundings. Anchoring People’s Square was a concrete tower connecting four pedestrian bridges, painted to look like blue and white porcelain.

I phoned the Pottery Workshop, obtained the address, and hailed a taxi. We drove through the winding, chaotic city center and then made a right onto a boulevard with antijaywalking railings running all the way down both sides. We passed a man standing over a sidewalk trash bin, squeezing the blood out of a headless snake, its body still coiled defiantly around the man’s arm. Tall brick smokestacks began to appear above the houses, and the driver aimed for a pair on our left. He told me that there was a saying in town that someone in every family was involved in porcelain and he estimated that there were probably thirty to forty thousand workshops just in our immediate vicinity, though all I could see were crumbling houses. As we approached the pair of circular chimneys, hunched-over old men began appearing on the roadside, pushing handcarts loaded with ceramics to and from the kilns that I still could not see.

The driver dropped me off at the main gate of a 1950s-era factory. I walked in and found the Pottery Workshop’s office, on the second floor of one of the larger buildings. In the office the woman I had spoken with on the phone asked if I could speak Chinese. “Yes,” I said.

“Well, why were you making me speak English, then?” she said. “So what kind of tour guide do you want?”

“English would be better,” I said.

“English would be better,” she muttered as she dialed someone on her phone.

A minute later an attractive young woman with a dash of freckles across her nose walked in and introduced herself as Jacinta. She wore skinny jeans and a fitted plaid top, and her chocolate hair was cut in a bob. I figured her for Japanese, but she was actually from the Shanghai suburbs and a fourth-year student in ceramic arts at the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute, a large four-year university in town. She spoke impeccable English with an American accent, using words like dude and pain in the ass. I was amazed to learn that she was completely self-taught, mostly from watching American television series, movies, and teen soap operas.

Jacinta seemed puzzled and somewhat suspicious about my presence. To express an interest in porcelain without also being an artist struck her as odd, and I disappointed her when I failed to recognize the principles—minor celebrities in the ceramics world—behind the Pottery Workshop. Founded by a Hong Kong artist, the Pottery Workshop was an effort to reestablish a modern creative industry in Jingdezhen, offering artist residencies, manufacturing designs, and selling its own line of wares. It hosted weekly salons by visiting artists and a Saturday-morning market for JCI students to sell their work.

Jacinta dutifully showed me around. After seeing the studio spaces, resident accommodations, and an array of kilns—electric, soda, wood burning, and an environmentally friendly “smokeless” kiln designed in Japan—we walked up the road that ran the length of the factory. The entire plant had once been China’s national sculpture factory, and clustered around the Pottery Workshop’s properties were studios and workshops still being run by local artists and craftsmen. Small shops had taken up the square, garagelike spaces lining the road, their storefronts crowded with the products they specialized in: vases, bowls, and figurines of Buddhas, goddesses, and Mao Zedong. Lean, shirtless men, all bone and ropy muscles wormed with veins, ferried pieces in various stages of production on handcarts. Playing cards littered the street; the porters used them as shims to level the pieces on their carts.

We arrived at a warehouse that the Pottery Workshop had rehabilitated into a large, airy work and lecture space with concrete floors and a high, slanted, churchlike roof, dubbed “Two Chimneys” for the twin spouts that rose up behind it. Contrasting the Pottery Workshop’s sleek, modern aesthetic, the sagging wooden shacks surrounding Two Chimneys housed dirty studios appointed with scavenged furniture; even the chimneys themselves had been cannibalized, filled with junk or hanging laundry.

What I had seen so far of Jingdezhen looked nothing like the bucolic village of ascetic artisans I had imagined. Jacinta said I was naïve. Though Jingdezhen was indeed the mecca of porcelain, it had long since lost its cachet, having lapsed into churning out derivative, low-quality ceramics for low-end markets. Decals and electric kilns had replaced hand-painting and wood-fired kilns. As China industrialized, ceramics had followed the same model as light manufacturing: everyone cutting corners as they tried to squeeze out tiny profits from even tinier pieces of the market. Artistry was an anachronism. Intellectual property was a joke. That Jingdezhen still managed to produce ceramics at all was a triumph in itself.

Jacinta had studied ballet for seven years as a child and aspired to become a professional dancer but wasn’t accepted into the state ballet school. She learned to draw when she decided to pursue becoming a makeup artist but didn’t get into the school for that, either. So she applied to the JCI, thinking she might develop an affinity for ceramics. “But I’m not cut out to be an artist,” she said. “I’m not crazy enough, or narcissistic enough. I’m not being modest. I sort of suck at ceramics.”

Jacinta struck me as a kind of kindred spirit, too Chinese for some things and not Chinese enough for others. When she asked again what I was doing in Jingdezhen and why I was so interested in porcelain, I felt that I could trust her with the story of my great-great-grandfather’s porcelain and the relative who had supposedly served as an official here, which perked her up. She wasn’t very clear about the city’s history or where I might find any records of the porcelain my great-great-grandfather had obtained from here, but she urged me to talk to the Japanese artist who managed the Pottery Workshop, who had done his own research on the topic. And she persuaded me to stay through the weekend for the lecture and the market, where she said I might meet some people who could help answer my questions.

I SPENT THE next few days wandering around the city in the August heat. On the corner of one large intersection near the university, seamstresses had set up a row of manual sewing machines. Across the street a little boy squatted before a hardware store, pushing a long shit out from his open-crotched pants. I ate noodles and pork buns from squalid, fly-infested holes in the wall. Even the drivers seemed too lethargic to bother honking as much as usual. Then I heard about an ancient kiln museum on the other side of town and hired a taxi to take me there.

The museum was more like a re-created porcelain village, in a wooded area on the other side of the Chang River that sliced through Jingdezhen and that had for centuries served as its lifeline to the outside world; now people and goods moved via roadways, railways, and the small airport with thrice-weekly flights to Shanghai. I appeared to be the only visitor and had to wake a napping employee to buy a ticket and hire a guide. My guide appeared, looking as if she too had just woken from a nap.

She gave her name as Zhang, and we began the tour at the throwing, painting, and glazing demonstration. As we entered the small courtyard, three ancient men roused themselves into action, like life-size coin-operated automatons. Moving with detached precision, one of them stuck a wooden staff into a nock on the edge of his throwing wheel and spun it up to speed. He slapped a lump of clay onto the wheel and expertly pulled a bowl from the clay in a few seconds and placed it on a plank to dry. The next man took a dried bowl, centered it on a wheel, gave it a spin, and painted circular designs on it. The last glazed a painted bowl not by spraying it but by dipping it into a barrel. In their bamboo work enclosures, they looked like prisoners.

That would be the most interesting part of the tour, the rest of which consisted of visits to nonmoving displays of kilns and ceramic materials. Zhang recited her script and mostly thwarted my attempts to ascertain the authenticity or age of the things we looked at. There was only one structure, from the Ming dynasty, for which she could definitively state its era. Each area had its own gift shop, and Zhang made sure I browsed every one of them before signing a paper at the cashier to confirm that she had brought her visitor through.

Our final stop was a temple manned by two bored-looking monks, who discreetly tucked their mobile phones into their robes when I entered. Even the temple had a gift shop, and Zhang passed me off to the young woman who worked there. She was more patient and friendlier than Zhang and explained to me that the temple was in honor of Tong Bin. Born in 1567, Tong Bin had been a precocious child and demonstrated an early aptitude for pottery. He quickly rose to become a master-level kiln master. Then the emperor demanded some especially large long gangs, or dragon pots, from the kiln. Tong Bin worked for fifteen years without producing a satisfactory long gang. Porcelain making at that time was far from precise, and the failure rate was high. The emperor grew impatient and dispatched a heavy-handed supervisor to Jingdezhen, where he declared that if the long gang could not be made, everyone involved with the kiln would be killed. There was only one long gang left to be fired, and when it was put into the kiln, Tong Bin jumped in with it. Because of his sacrifice, the firing was successful and the kiln was spared.

I frequently heard this kind of martyr story in China. The creation of bloodred glaze was attributed to a farmer’s daughter who jumped into the kiln. A mountain retreat near Shanghai named Moganshan was named for a pair of star-crossed lovers, Mo Ye and Gan Jiang. Gan was tasked to make a sword for the emperor and continually failed until Mo sacrificed herself by jumping into the cauldron of metal, which allowed Gan to forge a sword that exceeded the emperor’s demands.

“What is it with all these suicide stories in China?” I said.

The woman laughed. “Yes, there are lots of these types of stories,” she said. “But it’s not just China. What about Romeo and Juliet?”

ONE EVENING AT the Pottery Workshop’s coffee shop, perhaps the only place in town to get a decent espresso and a gathering place for the tiny expat population of English teachers and ceramists (often one and the same), I was introduced to the workshop’s director, ceramic artist Takeshi Yasuda, a stocky, balding man with a thin corona of gray hair. He wore baggy shorts, a white, sleeveless shirt, and technical sandals with curved rubber soles. His face was a composition of circles—a round forehead, round cheekbones, round jowls, and round tortoiseshell eyeglasses. Takeshi was married to an English ceramic artist and was on faculty at the Royal College of Art in London. He had not lived in Japan for so long that his niece told him that he spoke a very strange kind of Japanese.

“Jingdezhen was not where porcelain was invented,” he told me as he made me an Italian-style cappuccino. “But all the innovations after that took place in Jingdezhen.”

I sat at a glass-topped table displaying blue and white shards that Takeshi and others had picked up around the city and at the weekly antiques market, where I was told 99 percent of the intact pieces were falsely aged but the shards, which ranged in price from 20 to 300 RMB, were real. On the walls and shelves sat modern ceramics for sale, including some of Takeshi’s recent work, delicate pale green teaware with wabi sabi imperfections—an indentation here, a pinch there, an overlapping seam—formed from hands guided by a considered spontaneity. The thinness of the vessels interacted with gravity in the kiln, creating sagging bodies and warped lips that gave the impression that they were still spinning on the some invisible wheel, on the verge of deformation. They were so unlike the vast majority of wares in Jingdezhen’s stores, and very beautiful.

While Takeshi prepared my coffee, I studied the ancient fragments of bowls, dishes, and vases in the table displays. Fired anywhere from fifty to five hundred years before and smashed for some imperfection, their curved surfaces remained glossy and held thumb-size flowers, animals, and figures in domestic scenes, some complete, some severed. I found them even more captivating than what their former wholes must have been. Takeshi set down my cup, and I experienced a flash of disorientation as the café dilated back into view. “In Chinese culture, porcelain was the most important cultural item and also the most exchanged item with other cultures,” he said.

Throw a dart at a map of China, and it will probably land somewhere with an interesting porcelain history. The operative word here is history, for most of China’s famous porcelain cities had the connections to their glorious pasts broken long ago. The celebrated teapot clay in Yixing was mined out. Longquan, where celadon glaze was invented, managed to obtain UNESCO heritage status in 2009 but for “intangible” culture—every ancient kiln site had been destroyed. The giant-scale porcelain manufacturing in newly industrialized cities like Dehua relied on imported materials. Just one city’s kilns had never been extinguished: Jingdezhen’s, the buckle in China’s shard belt.

The Chinese have two words for ceramics, taoci and ciqi, which approximate as “pottery” and “porcelain” respectively. Pottery making in China dates back to the Neolithic, and the Chinese achieved high-fired glazed ceramics in the late Shang dynasty. Porcelain, roughly defined as translucent white clay body composed of kaolin and china stone and fired above 1,200 degrees Celsius, probably first appeared during the Tang dynasty (618 to 907), though its originator remains unknown; for all of China’s firsts, the inventors or discoverers were seldom recorded.

Porcelain soon became China’s most famous, most enduring invention. As early as the Tang dynasty, cargo ships loaded with porcelain sailed west for the Middle East, where middlemen would transfer the wares to Europe. For the Chinese, porcelain wasn’t just a sanitary material, dinnerware, or a hobby. Porcelain was as central to the Chinese identity as the Yangtze River, the bones to the Yangtze’s blood, and it was no accident that the material became eponymous with its country of origin. Porcelain touched every member of Chinese society, from peasants’ rice bowls to the imperial family’s massive collection. Porcelain formed the basis of China’s mythology and morality tales and fueled its economy, including the golden age of the Ming dynasty, which boasted the world’s largest economy. There was simply no Western analogue to the breadth and depth of porcelain’s infiltration of Chinese art, industry, and culture, though the automobile in America comes somewhat close.

Jingdezhen was established in 1004 by the Song dynasty emperor Jingde as China’s original factory city, achieving what alchemists had labored after in vain for centuries: to turn dirt into gold. Far from the quaint, pristine old China of the Western imagination, each area of this bustling artistic and industrial hulk was dedicated to one part of the porcelain-making process, from sourcing clay to packaging finished goods, and everything was done by hand. Entire neighborhoods of craftsmen spent their working lives mixing one glaze, throwing one shape, or applying a single brushstroke. Even the porters, moving the pieces through the city on bamboo yokes or handcarts, specialized in the items they transported. This narrow division of highly skilled labor, along with the area’s unique terroir, allowed the Jingdezhen appellation to monopolize the market for the better part of a millennium.

According to one enduring local myth, Jingdezhen was the birthplace of the term china. For centuries, the city was known as Chang Nan, or “South of the Chang River,” which provided its critical supply link; porcelain boats rode the Chang to Poyang Lake and Jiujiang, from which they accessed the Yangtze. Chang Nan manufactured the first Chinese porcelain for export, which had that name stamped on their bottoms. Western tongues approximated these wares’ place of origin as “china,” and the city’s name became synonymous with its product. Jingdezheners also liked to boast that the city escaped bombing during the Sino-Japanese War because Japanese pilots mistook the scores of tubular kiln chimneys for antiaircraft guns and figured it best to give the place a wide berth. (More likely the city wasn’t bombed because it served no strategic purpose.)

The Song dynasty—vibrant, prosperous, and renowned for its culture and diverse artistic tastes—was also very corrupt. The state weakened to the point that it lost its northern territories to the Jin and had to regroup in the south. Eventually Kublai Khan—grandson of Genghis—and the Mongols conquered all of China and launched the Yuan dynasty. The subsequent destruction of other major kilns left Jingdezhen as the beneficiary. The Mongols didn’t have the same appreciation for the finest Song ceramics—the seafoam of ge celadon, the milky turquoise of ru ware, or the copper flambé of jun ware. White was the sacred color for the Mongols, and the closest producer of white ceramics was Jingdezhen.

The Mongolian occupation was the most critical to Jingdezhen’s history. For centuries Chinese potters had battled gravity, trying to prevent a clay pot from collapsing during the firing process. The solution was finding the right material, and only high-quality porcelain stone—crushed into powder and reconstituted with enough water to make it malleable—could withstand the 1,250 degrees Celsius required to vitrify it into porcelain without deforming. Meanwhile the lowest melting point of glaze was just below 1,200 degrees Celsius, which gave potters a very narrow temperature range in which both a ceramic body and glaze would behave as desired.

The discovery of massive kaolin deposits in a mountain near Jingdezhen during the Yuan dynasty changed everything. Mixing kaolin into clay raises its firing temperature (improving yield) while also allowing potters to conserve precious porcelain stone (improving production) because it can comprise half of the clay body and maintain its structural integrity even when eggshell thin. And it wasn’t just the presence of kaolin that made Jingdezhen’s clay unique; it was also the specific properties of that kaolin, right down to its molecular structure. While in Jingdezhen, I met a geologist from Montana who had traveled there to study its ceramic materials and who told me that both the size of its clay particles and its impurities could not have been more perfectly suited for making pottery. “The materials are absolutely unique here,” he said. “A gift from heaven.”

Perhaps of most interest to the ruling Mongols, kaolin increased whiteness, and in 1278 Kublai Khan established a government bureau in nearby Fuliang, the county seat, to control the supply of materials. The idea behind that bureau—a government-supervised kiln in Jingdezhen—lasted until 1949, and if its records survived, they might hold information about the relative of mine who supposedly worked in Jingdezhen.

By the Yuan dynasty, the network of foreign traders in China was well established. While Chinese tastes still ran toward subdued monochromes, Middle Eastern and Persian markets favored boldly painted porcelains. The Persians already knew that cobalt pigment could produce vibrant blues, but they could produce only low-quality ceramic bodies. The Yuan court, seeking to increase its export revenues, hit upon the idea of using Persian cobalt to decorate Chinese porcelain. The resulting snow-white porcelain painted in rich blues created a sensation, and Jingdezhen’s blue and white wares were shipped across the world.

As the Yuan gave way to the Ming dynasty in 1368, marking the restoration of native Chinese rule, Jingdezhen maintained its preeminence. The conquering Ming emperor Hongwu consolidated the legitimacy of his rule in part by ordering new vessels for the various ceremonies, rites, and sacrifices to gods and ancestors prescribed since high antiquity. But instead of gold, silver, or bronze, he insisted that all the sacrificial objects be made of porcelain. Subsequent Ming emperors established the official imperial kiln in Jingdezhen, where the quality and quantity of production were held to exacting standards; a production run of a thousand identical objects might yield just a handful of acceptable ones to send on to Beijing. Official wares began bearing the emperor’s reign mark—now one of the first things experts check to determine the age, authenticity, and value of antique porcelain.

With the Manchu-led Qing dynasty came the apex of Chinese porcelain. The Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors took personal interests in porcelain production, partly out of a tradition of patronizing the arts and also partly to assimilate into Han Chinese culture. The result was an unparalleled explosion of high-quality techniques, glazes, and forms. Western influences also began to seep into porcelain. Missionaries had brought painted enamelware to China during the early Qing, and Kangxi fell so deeply in love with it that he all but forced missionaries—Guiseppe Castiglione being the most prominent—into imperial workshops to train and supervise painters. Jingdezhen continued to produce the porcelain bodies, which were decorated and finished in Beijing.

At its peak in the Qing dynasty, Jingdezhen hummed with densely packed houses, crowded streets, and temples built by merchants and boatsmen seeking favor with the gods. Its one million inhabitants (about the same number as today) quarried deep into the surrounding hills for porcelain stone and clear-cut the forests to feed the thousands of kilns burning around the clock. Jingdezhen’s chimneys not only defined its skyline, the same way church towers rose above the rooftops in European cities, but also served as its nuclei. The chimneys were why transporters hauled materials over great distances from the forested hills into the workshops, and why the clay passed through a horde of processors, throwers, trimmers, carvers, painters, glazers, retouchers, and others on its way to the kiln (the saying in Jingdezhen was that a dozen hands touched each piece from start to finish), where it vitrified under the watchful eye of the kiln master, perhaps the most alchemical of the ceramic specialists. Once the kiln was packed and sealed, it consumed a nonstop diet of pine billets for more than a week to reach temperature, which the kiln master, without the benefit of thermometers, determined by watching the color of the flames, observing the luminosity of the saggers (the clay containers in which the ceramics were fired), and spitting on the bricks. It took four days for the kiln to cool, after which workers still had to wrap their hands and bodies in protective layers of wet cloth to extract the saggers, and opened them to see if the firing had been successful.

When the kilns turned from wood to coal, their chimneys—still the tallest structures in town—emitted a foot’s worth of soot annually. The eighteenth-century French Jesuit priest François Xavier d’Entrecolles (one of many missionaries who traveled to China to uncover its porcelain secrets) wrote that at night “one thinks that the whole city is on fire, or that it is one large furnace with many vent holes.”

Over the centuries Jingdezhen’s kilns developed glaze that could show mixed colors and graduations within the paint. They invented twice-fired doucai colored wares and polychrome enameled wucai pieces. Lead arsenic created pink, which allowed for the depiction of peaches, an important achievement as the peach tree was soaked with historical and cultural significance. “All these inventions are extraordinary inventions,” Takeshi said. “And all these decoration and material technologies were done here in Jingdezhen. It’s the most amazing thing.”

While Jingdezhen rose, European scientists remained baffled over how to produce porcelain. Some believed that it was formed when falling stars struck the earth. Others theorized it was made of crushed eggshells or a special fish paste left to ripen underground for one hundred years. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans journeyed to China to discover porcelain’s arcanum, but no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t reproduce the translucent material that was “white as jade, thin as paper, bright as a mirror, with the sound of a music stone [when struck].” Until the eighteenth century, the disparity between the Chinese and Western ceramic industries was as stark as that between China and the West in the centuries that followed.

The savior came in an unexpected form. Johann Böttger was a Saxon charlatan who claimed to have successfully produced gold from base metals. His boasting earned him an audience with Frederick I, who demanded he make good on his claims. Böttger escaped, only to be “rescued” by the king of Saxony, August the Strong. August believed Böttger could solve his treasury’s woes and placed him under protective custody until he produced gold. In Dresden, Böttger faked his way through alchemical procedures until a sympathetic court scientist suggested he search for a way to produce the next best thing to gold: porcelain. He began experimenting with different clays and, because he wasn’t completely unskilled, designed a kiln that could reach 1,300 degrees Celsius. Judging by the sign he hung outside his workshop, which read, “God, our creator, has turned a gold maker into a potter,” he worked grudgingly.

In 1708 Böttger happened to receive a shipment of hair powder, which he assayed as both a natural substance and having an unusual weight. It was kaolin. Following the successful firing of porcelain, Böttger’s laboratory relocated to Meissen in 1709, and Meissen porcelain hit the market in 1713, a harbinger for the rise of companies like Wedgwood and the end of China’s prosperity.

During the late Qing, as subsequent emperors lost interest in porcelain or became too busy with trying to hold their empire together, the kilns were entrusted to local authorities, and imperial styles declined. Except for brief periods of renewed interest, such as the garishly colored sets of tableware and boxes that Cixi commissioned for her birthdays in 1884, 1894, and 1904 during her reign of excess, the imperial kilns faded.

In 1949 the new Communist government began consolidating Jingdezhen’s kilns into ten nationalized factories, each specializing in a certain type of ceramics: the Shi Da Ci Chang, or Ten Great Factories. One made blue and white, one made on-glaze painted pieces, one made sculptures, one made oversize pieces, and so on. The factories were overemployed, saddled with bureaucracy, and wages were modest, but the jobs were secure and everyone “ate from the big bowl of rice.”

The Ten Great Factories all failed after privatization in the 1990s, destroying the local economy and hollowing out the company town’s core industry. Employees were let go or forced to take early retirements. (One local told me some factory retirees received a monthly pension of 160 RMB, about twenty dollars.) Some of the factories were too bankrupt to pay owed wages and gave porcelain as severance. But as they said in Jingdezhen, you can’t eat porcelain, and downtown filled with people selling surplus porcelain from handcarts. The empty factories fell into disrepair, their inventory piled outside and overtaken by vegetation. A popular site for Western artists to visit was a defunct plate factory, with seemingly endless stacks of unwanted plates left behind the buildings, perhaps all the more remarkable that they remained undisturbed in a country where nearly everything was scavenged. Porcelain manufacturing has relocated to the coast, where it relies on machines and has become notorious for lacking creativity, quality, and respect for intellectual property. Jingdezhen’s factories lie in ruins, the once-great porcelain industry now consisting of a fragmented assortment of individual workshops and kilns manned by aging former factory employees who continue the ancient handcrafted traditions both out of stubbornness and for lack of a better alternative.

Meanwhile the political cadres posted in Jingdezhen often come from elsewhere, with their eyes on the next rung on the party ladder, so they aren’t particularly interested in Jingdezhen’s porcelain history or its affairs in general. The development that occurred in Jingdezhen—the new roads, the Walmart, and the wrapping of streetlights in blue and white porcelain—was funded by the central government, and the local government seems preoccupied with grandiose projects, such as building oversize (and vacant) apartment complexes, often ruining ancient kiln sites in the process, or establishing heavy industry like the Sikorsky helicopter plant or Suzuki factory. Huge billboards both advertise and veil the construction taking place behind them, projects with names like “Regal Mansions” and “Upper East Side JDZ,” and advertising copy such as “harmonious imitating nature’s godliness symbolism.” Plenty of these projects never finish once the government and developer have made their money, leaving the city dotted with cavernous multistory concrete shells.

Or the local government constructs boondoggles like the China Ceramic Museum. Reclining atop a mountain miles from any historically significant ceramics site and served by a 200-foot-wide traffic artery at least 150 feet wider than necessary, the museum was initiated as a showpiece for former president Jiang Zemin’s 2004 visit to his ancestral home in northern Jiangxi. But once Jiang came and went, work on the museum essentially stopped, leaving an impressive glass and steel facade and little else. The museum’s vast window frames remain empty, water damage has created long fissures in the walls, and rusting, peeling trusses arch overhead. The concrete floors are still tracked with cemented footprints and studded with jagged ends of rebar. In some wings, staircases descend into dirt and weeds. The only area of the museum that seems complete is the hall dedicated to photographs and paraphernalia commemorating Jiang Zemin’s visit. The museum still has no expected opening date, no plan, no curatorial team, and not a single item in its collection. “It’s very Chinese,” Takeshi said. “They think you can build anything, even culture.”

That was the Jingdezhen that Takeshi and the Pottery Workshop were fighting against. When he was younger, Takeshi had spent a decade in Mashiko, a Japanese ceramics village, where he watched all the old master craftsmen disappear. While in England, he had seen the extinction of its country potters. The same was happening in Jingdezhen, he said. “You can see this town is going to change very quickly in the next ten to twenty years, unless these trained people in ceramics change their products to what makes sense in modern society,” he said. “That’s how Jingdezhen survived a thousand years. The most important tradition is that the industry changes with society. I’m not a museum guy. That’s not how to preserve tradition. That’s how I see traditions die.”

For now, Jingdezheners can still claim that the city’s kilns have never been snuffed out. While other porcelain cities came and went, Jingdezhen’s kilns fired through dynastic upheavals, wars, and disastrous national policies, leaving behind a stories-deep layer of topsoil so saturated with old kilns and shards that it glitters.

UNTIL I SAW those shards in the Pottery Workshop’s coffee shop, I had seen no indication of such abundance. The Jingdezhen I had experienced appeared paved over and far removed from its ancient past. But the shards ignited a longtime impulse, the same one that compelled me to spend hours sifting through my Legos for the right piece, to steal baseball cards, to interview twice as many people as I needed to for the perfect nugget of information, to scour classified ads for classic tennis racquets. And the shards offered the chance to collect not only old, real Chinese things but also objects that could have come directly from my great-great-grandfather’s time and beyond. The attraction was so powerful that I never questioned my desire.

I asked Takeshi where I could find some for myself. Everywhere, he said. Historically important kiln sites were still being discovered all the time. He had once gone to visit a site outside of the city, where a road was being built atop a huge Song-era kiln. “It was ten meters deep, freshly dug, and some pots looked like they were put there that day,” he said. “Amazing! There were more pots and saggers than soil, and it was all nine hundred years old! This was during the dragon kiln period, so every firing had tons of discarded material.”

Even Jingdezhen’s waterways were plaqued with shards, since anything broken during transit or loading was summarily tossed overboard. Most residents above a certain age could remember when the Chang River ran so clean, they could read the characters on the shards lining its bottom, in such quantities that they had to wear shoes when swimming to protect their feet from getting cut.

But like any beginner, I still couldn’t see what I sought, until one evening before I returned to Shanghai. Just beyond the layer of new development ringing People’s Square, I happened upon a construction site where workers had dug a long trench about eight feet deep through a historic neighborhood. An equally long pile of earth stretched along the trench. The sun had settled at a languid position in the sky, dimming its heat, and residents had emerged from their shady refuges. Dozens of men, women, and children stood in the ditches, chipping away at the walls with hand tools. Others clutched old rice sacks and walked meandering search patterns over the removed soil. I went over to see what they were doing and realized that the soil was studded with blue and white shards, and the walls of the trench were composed of layer upon layer of shard deposits.

Once I saw these first shards in situ, I began seeing them everywhere, as clear as stars in a night sky. They seemed to multiply before me, a carpet of blue and white fragments stretching from my feet to the horizon.

I walked over to the trench and picked up a few blue and white fragments. It was technically illegal to dig for porcelain shards, but the city supposedly looked the other way when it came to combing through the disturbed soil of construction sites. And there was no shortage of construction in town. Entire neighborhoods of kilns and houses, some of which dated back a thousand years to the Song dynasty, had been clear-cut for a new shopping center, apartment complexes, and a five-star “luxury” hotel. (Every time one of these was built in China, a Communist received his wings.) Takeshi had told me that an archaeological team might make a survey of a potentially important site, but most of the time they couldn’t be bothered because there were just too many ancient kilns to inspect them all. But what was bad for preservation was great for shard hunting. Every morning before the machinery started up, people flocked to the construction sites with trowels and picks, and they came back in the evenings after the workers knocked off.

A woman in dirty clothes appeared from the other side of the pile, holding a sack and a handpick. “Are you looking for shards?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you sell them?”

“Are you interested in buying?” she asked.

“I might be.”

The woman made a quick scan of the area and squatted down to show me what she had picked. “Well, take a look, then,” she said, showing me fragments of what she claimed were Ming dynasty bowls. They were so lustrous, and the painted blue on them so sharp, that I had trouble believing they were three hundred years old.

“Are you sure these aren’t Republican?” I said.

“Look at the glaze,” she said. “Look at how much higher quality it is. That one you’re holding, that’s Republican.”

I tossed away my shard. She seemed to know what she was doing, so I asked if she could take me around to look for shards. “No, I don’t have the time,” she said, and moved away.

IT TOOK ONLY a few days for me to see that, for all its rudeness, Jingdezhen was one of the most vibrant, dynamic, and unique places in China, as well as one of its most threatened. So many lines of Chinese history intersected here, including my own, and those lines remained intact—for the moment. I returned to Shanghai still wanting to know if San Yi Po’s father, Ting Geng, had really served as the xian zhang, or county commissioner, of Jingdezhen. And how he had acquired porcelain for my great-great-grandfather. And I wanted shards. But Jingdezhen’s tension between past, present, and future was so urgent and intoxicating—and real—that instead of just returning for another short trip, I decided I needed to move there.

I had to extract myself from Shanghai. Once I used up my vacation days at work, I applied for a leave of absence. Richard didn’t object; the tenor of so many family interactions depended on felicitous timing. Whether it was my being Richard’s nephew, or how little I would be missed, I was approved for my leave. I returned to Jingdezhen in October.

To help me find an apartment, Jacinta, from the Pottery Workshop, introduced me to her friend Maggie Chen, a Japanese major at the JCI and Jingdezhen native. There wasn’t much housing to choose from—returning JCI students had snapped up all the cheap apartments close to campus. I thought my requirements were modest, a Western toilet and a shower, but many Jingdezhen residents only had running water for a few hours during the day, filling buckets every morning to last them the day, and Western toilets were rare. Still, Maggie didn’t stop trying, and I couldn’t believe how determined she was to help. She shook off my gratitude. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ve got time, so I’m happy to help, and who knows, maybe you can help me down the road. Besides, you’re Chinese. If you were a laowai, I probably wouldn’t have agreed.”

After about a week, Maggie found an apartment for me, on the top floor of a five-story building near the JCI. The only catch was the landlord, Ms. Zhang, a friend of her mother’s. Ms. Zhang had once been rich, owning several apartments in Jingdezhen, until some tenants skipped town with a lot of her money. Then her husband ran off with another woman, leaving her to raise their daughter alone. Those experiences had left Ms. Zhang a paranoid, insistent middle-aged woman with a face tensed in a permanent grimace. She was luosuo in its purest, pain-in-the-ass sense.

Most of the apartment’s lightbulbs had burned out, but when Maggie asked if she would replace them, Ms. Zhang said that it wasn’t convenient for her to do so. “This is plenty of light,” Ms. Zhang said. “You’re not going to do anything in this living room except sit around anyway. What do you need so much light for at night? Just go to sleep.”

We got nowhere, but I took the apartment. I soon discovered that the toilet tank leaked and the hot water from the shower nozzle ran at a trickle. A handyman told me there was nothing he could do, so I took cold showers for a while and, when the nights turned chilly, knelt in the tub with a bucket and a kettle of boiled water. When I brought it up with Ms. Zhang, she said, “The shower is fine. How much are you going to bathe in the winter anyway?”

There was nothing I could say about the apartment that would make Ms. Zhang concede anything was wrong. China is too often a country of chabuduo, literally “not far off” and essentially “good enough.” “You ordered a cup, right? Well, here’s a cup,” a potter might say. “But it’s not the cup I ordered,” the customer might protest. “Ach!” the potter replies with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Chabuduo.” The reaction to broken things or systems isn’t to repair or replace them but to modify one’s expectations. In some ways, this is a hallmark of Chinese adaptability, but I just saw parsimony and laziness. Even Maggie’s advice when I complained about Ms. Zhang’s luosuo-ness belied the very mentality that I couldn’t stand. “You have to get used to it,” she said. “She’s the same age as your mother, probably, so you better learn how to take it.”

DURING THE WEEKEND student art market, I caught up with Caroline Cheng, the founder of the Pottery Workshop, painting vases in her studio. Despite being Chinese, growing up in Hong Kong, and having trained in ceramics, Caroline had never heard of Jingdezhen, or even been to China, until 1998, when a Canadian artist gave a lecture on Chinese ceramics at her Hong Kong ceramics studio. She went to China that same year, touring Yixing, Jingdezhen, Xi’an, Shanghai, and Beijing. “My god, I was blown away,” she said. “Ceramic art in China was like from Mars. It was nothing like the Western work I’d ever seen.”

For however cha, or substandard, present-day Jingdezhen is, it was even more filthy and run down back then. Only the central arteries were paved, and none of them had streetlights. The entire city worked and lived on the sun’s schedule, and nights were nearly pitch black. The only flight into the city departed from a military airport in Beijing. People’s Square was a garbage-strewn soccer field where farmers peddled shards, and every day at four p.m. the coal-fired kilns started belching black smoke. The JCI was in a state of disrepair. But Caroline saw, tucked away in the failed factories and old neighborhoods, expert craftsmen, unique materials, singular products, and peerless workmanship, all with no thought whatsoever given to design, and came to the same conclusion as I had during my first visit. “It was very dirty, very ugly, and very interesting,” she said. “I fell in love with it.”

She grew determined to save the city. When she met Takeshi Yasuda, who would become the Pottery Workshop’s general manager, in 2004, she laid out her vision. “I love Jingdezhen, you love Jingdezhen,” she told him. “And we want the whole world to know about it, to let people come work with local artisans and craftsmen, have a cultural exchange, and help young artists.”

Takeshi told her that they would need three things to get foreign artists to travel to Jingdezhen: a clean bathroom, a good cup of coffee, and wireless Internet. While Caroline toured prospective sites in Jingdezhen for the Pottery Workshop, she immediately saw the potential of the former national sculpture factory, one of the Ten Great Factories. Established in 1956 as the national center for sculpture, the Sculpture Factory produced religious figurines and animals for both domestic and export markets until the Cultural Revolution, when it was ordered to destroy all the figurines, including their molds and designs. The factory survived by making politically neutral animals and ceramic molds for industrial gloves; one small workshop in the Sculpture Factory continued to make the glove molds, and the stacks of old molds that looked like severed white arms were popular souvenirs for foreign visitors.

During the Cultural Revolution the factory also produced many, many sculptures of Mao, another tradition that continued in the current workshops. One afternoon I followed a beaten path through tall weeds to a courtyard flanked by dilapidated wooden sheds. I peeked into one of them and saw three rows of waist-high sculptures of Mao standing with his right hand in the air and “Long Live Chairman Mao” on the base. The man smoothing out the bases introduced himself as Luo Sifu (sifu meaning “master” and used to address drivers, craftsmen, and other vocational workers). “These were ordered by a French artist,” he said. “He comes here every year. This time he ordered one hundred.”

“Do you make Dengs?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I did once, but you can’t sell them,” he said. “Deng made a lot of changes that my grandparents’ generation wasn’t used to, so they’re not as warm to him. They don’t buy him here, much less abroad. But everyone recognizes Mao.”

“You must be doing pretty well, making such a big order for a foreigner,” I said.

“We don’t make shit,” he said, keeping his eyes on his work. “It’s the interpreter who makes all the money. They give a high price to the artist, and we make what we make.”

Luo Sifu had started in the Sculpture Factory in 1980 as an eighteen-year-old apprentice to his parents. He took over the workshop after three years when his parents died or, as he put it, “went to play mah-jongg with Mao.” “When my father was making these, it was very serious,” he said. “You had to be careful where you put them, definitely not on the floor. And if you fired one wrong, you couldn’t smash it. You had to get rid of it very carefully—otherwise people would take it as a political statement.”

The exact date of the Ten Great Factories’ demise varied. Lifelong Jingdezhen residents stated years from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. I often wondered why I got such different answers for such a cataclysmic event that happened within my lifetime. It used to be that objects weren’t considered old unless they were a thousand years old. But the speed of China’s growth, hurtling exponentially faster away from its history, seemed to compress time, and now twenty years seemed aeons ago.

Whenever it collapsed, the Sculpture Factory employees retreated to small workspaces in the factory. Because of the unique nature of its work, the Sculpture Factory had resisted many mass-production techniques, leaving a dormant ecosystem of glazers, throwers, kilns, and other specialists all within a stone’s throw of one another, just waiting for a keystone species to support. The arrival of the Pottery Workshop completely revitalized the Sculpture Factory. Mold makers and glaze mixers moved in. A tool shop opened. Artists from across China migrated to the Sculpture Factory just to be near the Pottery Workshop—studio space was scarce and fiercely contested. The porters who were once on the verge of extinction could now make four thousand RMB a month, more than a taxi driver.

This was how Caroline envisioned saving Jingdezhen, by reconnecting it with artistry and helping it make the right product for its time. But for all the contributions the Pottery Workshop has made in reinvigorating the porcelain ecology, old habits die hard. The local craftsmen, skilled as they were, remain extremely entrenched in their practices, and many of the foreign artists visiting Jingdezhen who completed residencies in Japan and Korea regard the habits in Chinese workshops with a mixture of amazement, disapproval, and annoyance. In Japan, artists are stereotypically obsessive in everything they do, setting out a white towel on which they line up their shiny tools and throwing away work that doesn’t meet stringent standards. When artists aren’t working, they are cleaning. In Jingdezhen, the workshop floors are littered with debris, the craftsmen are fast and messy, makeshift tools are the norm, quality is hit or miss, and there is little urgency to meet deadlines. A Peruvian artist told me she turned the entire city upside down looking for a measuring cup and came up empty. And in all her years of hosting lectures by visiting artists, Caroline couldn’t recall a single local student asking why someone made something. “All they’re interested in is how they can make the same thing,” she said.

I WENT TO FIND Fu Sifu, a local potter I had met on my first trip to Jingdezhen who’d told me he would take me shard hunting. His studio was in the Lao Chang, or Old Factory, which, despite its name, was neither old nor a factory. A few minutes’ walk from the back gate of the Sculpture Factory, the Lao Chang was a collection of residences and workshops built in the 1990s during the rise of privatization and the decline of the national factories. The itinerant population of independent craftsmen renting the workshops churned out everything from small jars and vases to huge hand-rolled tiles, all seeking to make enough money that their progeny wouldn’t have to do the same.

I walked up the Lao Chang’s main road, lined with oozing heaps of trash so putrid I felt I might get sick just looking at them. Wild mutts with elongated bodies and folded, triangular ears rooted through the trash. I narrowly missed stepping into a maggoty pile of chicken feathers and entrails, having smelled it milliseconds before I set my foot down. Not far from the garbage piles, freshly thrown and molded clay bodies congregated along the defunct train tracks cutting through the Lao Chang, drying in the sunlight and giving perch to butterflies and dragonflies. A Chinese art professor who had done his MFA in Illinois told me that this contrast between ugliness and beauty was what made the Lao Chang his favorite place in Jingdezhen, as well as the most representative of modern China.

At Fu Sifu’s studio, I found only his parked scooter. After a while Fu Sifu showed up, wearing short athletic shorts and a tank top, displaying the characteristic build of someone who wrestled with clay for a living: muscular arms and shoulders, thin waist, and strong quadriceps, which were used to brace the elbows when sitting at the throwing wheel. He rolled up the overhead door and showed me his studio. On a small platform sat a motorized throwing wheel. In the other corner was a stool and glaze gun. Most of the shelves were taken up by his cups. Packs of clay were stacked on the floor. Fu Sifu was the rare potter in Jingdezhen who handled the entire process himself, until the piece was ready for the kiln.

“It’s very nice,” he said. “When I feel like making something, I make something. When I don’t, I do something else.” He hopped onto the platform and sat at the wheel. I watched him pull a few bowls, leaning into it with his head slightly cocked and nodding, as if listening to a beat only he could hear. He seemed to navigate the clay by feel rather than by looking at it. After every bowl he looked up, the trance broken, and smiled. “It’s really not that difficult,” he said.

I jumped onto the back of Fu Sifu’s scooter, and we drove to a neighborhood in Jingdezhen’s old center, across the street from the Walmart, the Shiba Qiao (Eighteen Bridges, for the ancient network of waterways and crossings that no longer exists). There is an old saying that Jingdezhen consists of ninety-nine neighborhoods, though Fu Sifu said few people know about them anymore, or can locate them, so much has been cut down for new construction. Within these old neighborhoods, the craftsmen are fiercely protective of their trade secrets, passing down their knowledge only to direct descendants. This secrecy, Fu Sifu said, explains why China is so slow to change or innovate. “No one will say, ‘Hey, you do this well, and I do that well, so let’s work together,’ ” he said. “They all work alone thinking theirs is better than everyone else’s. That’s why you have so many small shops doing the exact same thing.”

We carried rice sacks and walked through the marketplace and into the old houses, through the thirty-foot-long remnant of what had once been a long lane with houses on each side, and out to a pair of small dirt piles next to a new foundation. Trash and pottery shards piled against the houses that remained. A man urinated in the other corner. “Look at this,” Fu Sifu said of a half-destroyed, double-layered wall insulated with pieces of brick. “Many generations of people lived here. All gone now.” He rooted through the dirt and collected a few pieces of pottery. “You can clean these off, and they’ll look really nice,” he said. “There won’t be any more in the future.”

While I scanned the earth for shards, Fu Sifu continued to admire the wall. He pointed to the bricks, dark and glossy with the iridescent isobars of an oil slick. Over Jingdezhen’s thousand years of history, wood-burning kilns had fired nearly all its wares. And when these kilns were fired, their entrances were blocked up with a wall of bricks. Those bricks became glazed when the flying ash stuck to and melted on their faces. After a few uses, the vitrified bricks were discarded and scavenged as building materials. Once I began to notice them, the entire old city appeared to have been constructed from these bricks, glinting like obsidian.

“You don’t have to dig for shards,” Fu Sifu said. “Just pick off the surface. You can find plenty of things that way.”

“What do you look for?”

“Pieces with flowers, designs, those are worth it,” he said. “Value depends on the person. If you feel like it, pick it up. Wah! Look at this.” He extracted the base of a fencai overglaze painted bowl with a Kangxi reign mark. “This is really rare. This is worth money.”

As recently as fifteen years ago, these shards were as useless as they were plentiful. Everyone knew that the city government’s offices sat atop an old imperial kiln, but no one had much interest in its artifacts. But as the Chinese economy gained strength, and its people grew more confident and nationalistic, native traditions became valuable again. Suddenly antique porcelain could fetch millions, and so even shards found a market. When the city government vacated its old offices, residents flooded the site with picks and shovels, overwhelming the city’s ad hoc preservation efforts. Locals even set up small stores near the site just so they could sneak over or dig tunnels under the hastily erected wall at night. Eventually the city razed all the buildings around the site and turned it into a museum.

Fu Sifu dropped the Kangxi shard into his bag, and we moved through more construction, scrambling up a large pile of excavated dirt that had sat long enough to have formed a hard crust. Fu Sifu had grown up around here, and despite the sound of hammers and power saws filling the air, just enough of the old neighborhood remained for him to orient himself. “There used to be all these little streets here, but they’re gone now,” he said. “It was all connected, all the way to that chimney.” He pointed to a turret far off on the horizon. We peered into the pit that the hill we were standing on had come from; the walls were layer upon layer of collapsed kilns and shard beds. The rounded forms of broken teacups looked like clutches of fossilized dinosaur eggs. “Those shards two meters down, they’re about a hundred years old,” he said. That was only halfway to the bottom. “And there’s even more under there.”

We walked to the street where Fu Sifu had lived until he was eight years old, formerly anchored by a lively market that Fu would buy rice from for his family. His parents and grandparents had worked in a porcelain factory making dinnerware. “It was better than being farmers,” he said. “They had work, they had food—what else do you need?” He considered it fortunate that his mother had taken an early retirement from the factory and received a full pension that helped to support the family when the factories died. After he finished school, he sought out a master to teach him how to throw, and he had been working in ceramics since 1998.

Now Fu Sifu’s old street was completely flattened, except for three sagging wooden houses. Some of the old signs indicating the names of the neighborhoods still hung at the heads of the remaining alleys, all but drowned out by electrical wiring and modern signage. A brick wall bore the faded remnants of a political banner: Executing the one-child policy is the responsibility of young people! We walked out to a street corner with two- and three-story tiled buildings. “This was one of the first areas they developed,” Fu said. “When they built those buildings, there were tons of shards. They’re under here, too, but you’ll have to wait until they rebuild this street to find them.”

As we circled back to his scooter, Fu pointed out the woodcarvings that still adorned many of the old doorways. The modern architecture was so visually noisy, it made seeing the historical buildings and houses difficult. But if I concentrated on shapes or textures—a curved eave, weathered wood, the telltale glint of kiln brick—they still revealed themselves. “What happens to these old places?” I asked. “Do people preserve them?”

Fu threw up his hands. “If you were that poor, living in those circumstances, would you be interested in preservation?” he said. “You can’t even fill your belly. How can you worry about preservation?”

When Fu Sifu dropped me off after lunch, we argued over the bag of shards. I wanted to divide them. He insisted that I keep everything. I relented, but when I dumped out the sack’s contents in my room, I didn’t see the fencai Kangxi piece that we had picked up, leaving me with an assortment of Republican-era fragments that I, despite being new to the game, had already dismissed as not old enough for my taste. I pawed through the shards again and again, but it didn’t appear. I wondered if Fu Sifu had kept it and hoped that he had.

THE ONE THING about my apartment that I couldn’t deal with was the cockroaches, which infested the kitchen and bathroom; I often had to scatter them out of the tub before bathing. I called Ms. Zhang to say that the situation was untenable. Maggie taught me the Chinese word for “cockroach,” which was easy to remember since it was a homonym for “filth wolf.”

Ms. Zhang came over to the apartment, complaining that she had never had a tenant as luosuo as me. I reminded her that I had accepted a litany of the apartment’s shortcomings. “But there are tons of cockroaches,” I said. “I see them every—”

“Cockroaches?” she repeated, laughing. “That’s not a problem. They’re completely normal here. We treat them like our children.”

Maybe so, I said, but I was moving out. I had paid three months’ rent and stayed less than two weeks, so I offered to let her keep the entire first month but wanted the last two back. Ms. Zhang refused, saying that it was my problem, not hers. I argued with her about it, because I figured if I couldn’t get a fair deal from some luosuo landlady in Jingdezhen, what hope did I have trying to convince officials to let me dig for my family’s porcelain? I eventually got her to concede the last month and checked into a hotel, where I took one of the most satisfying showers of my life. A few days later I was introduced to an Australian artist who offered to let me stay in her apartment after she returned to Melbourne. She had managed to buy a two-floor unit in a new development not far from the Sculpture Factory and renovated it with Western bathrooms and even a full oven.

After I moved to my new lodgings, Lewis phoned to say he couldn’t help me look for my great-great-grandfather’s old house. “Why not?” I said.

“I talked to Grandma, and she made me promise not to,” he said. “For political reasons.”

“Political?” I said. “How?”

“Because she’s afraid if I take you to their graves, people will see a rich American there and go dig up their graves.”

So that was the “dangerous” reason why my grandmother had forbidden me from going to Xingang. “That doesn’t sound political to me,” I said.

“Everything in China is political.”

I STARTED LOOKING for someone to help me research San Yi Po’s father, the supposed former county commissioner, in the local archives and was introduced to Ding Shaohua, a twenty-five-year-old student at the JCI who had worked for a stint at the Pottery Workshop. I met him at a Korean restaurant in the jumble of shops across from the JCI, where he had already ordered a large bottle of beer, two glasses, and a bag of shelled peanuts. I liked him immediately. He wore a white dress shirt and had spiked his short hair up. He was guileless and curious and thoughtful, and while he spoke good English, it restricted his natural garrulousness, so we switched to Chinese, in which, thanks to the immersion in Jingdezhen, I had become fairly proficient.

Ding was born in Jiangxi but grew up in a suburb of Shanghai. He had been an uninterested student in high school and enrolled in the JCI for ceramics just to please his family—despite being known for its ceramic program, the JCI was something of a safety school—figuring he’d switch to another subject once he got to campus. But as soon as he saw how small the school was, how dirty the streets were, and how tu, or “unsophisticated” (tu literally means “earth” or “dirt” and forms the root for the insult tubaozi, or “country bumpkin”) the professors were, from their clothing to their outlooks, he lost hope. And he wasn’t allowed to change his major, either. Now he was about to graduate from the JCI with a ceramic arts degree that he didn’t care about; he smashed all his work as soon as it was graded.

But during his first year at school, he met an older JCI student who was working at the Pottery Workshop as an interpreter. Once he saw the opportunities available to a skilled English speaker, he ignored his classes, avoided his classmates (“I just thought everyone there was sick, and I didn’t want to catch it and get dragged down with them”), and devoted all of his time to improving his English.

He passed China’s College English Test, a requirement for graduation and something employers increasingly look for in applicants, on his first try, despite not being able to study after eleven p.m. because that was when the JCI shut off the power for the night. Then he caught on with another outfit offering artist residencies and helped guide tours of China for visiting artists. Now he was trying to start his own travel service. He dreamed of working on a cruise ship.

Ding didn’t know much about the archives but said he’d ask around for me. And when I mentioned my interest in collecting ancient shards, he told me he knew of an area outside town where I could find piles of them.

Ding arranged for a driver to take us to the shards, and I met him one morning at the entrance of the Sculpture Factory. We were joined by a local artist, Kai E, a small, trim woman with the patina of someone who had recently made the transition to mother. A native of Hainan, the tropical island province in the South China Sea, Kai E had tried and failed to get into art school twice, after which her father told her she had to go to work. But she wanted to make art, so she came to Jingdezhen for the JCI’s accounting school, thinking she could switch to ceramic arts. The school refused to allow it, so she dropped out and started her own ceramics practice. She was a complete autodidact, never missing a Pottery Workshop lecture, reading books, and studying shards.

Ding wore a green T-shirt that read, in English, “Being gay is not a choice … Hate is.” I asked him where he got the shirt.

“The market downtown,” he said. “What’s it mean?”

I explained it.

“Ah, so it’s about equality,” he said, nodding.

Our driver, Qi Sifu, was born in San Bao, a valley in Jingdezhen’s southern hills that had supplied clay to Jingdezhen since the Song dynasty. He had deep roots in that industry, and his family still operated water hammers in San Bao, smashing porcelain stone and processing it into bricks. He used to do it himself before he bought a van and started his car service.

Beyond the dusty, angular masses of Jingdezhen’s industrial plants, we entered the countryside of rice fields and wooded foothills braided with alpine streams. Farmers coaxed water buffalo through verdant plots and graves dotted the rises. As much as I romanticized China’s old cities, they had been dirty, crowded, full of dysentery. Then as now, the Chinese yearned for the clean air, fresh water, and solitude of the countryside. There was a reason for all the ghastly new houses in rural villages.

This entire area went by the name Nanshijie and had been the location of a quarry for porcelain stone, which was processed into a one-source clay. The clay fired extremely white, but without additives to firm up its bones, it could be used to make only small objects—cups, bowls, and teapots. This clay and the surrounding pine forests had once sustained hundreds of ancient kilns. Between the Song and the Yuan dynasties, Jingdezhen’s ceramics center relocated to Hutian, near the mouth of the San Bao valley, and began producing blue and white wares for export. It was closer to the river and obviated the laborious method of transport by horse or handcart on unpaved roads, and Nanshijie declined. Now, Qi Sifu said, people in the area mostly survived by mining coal.

We passed through the village of Liujiawan, which used to be home to an eponymous kiln. “This area, about thirty thousand square meters, is probably all shards,” Qi Sifu said. “They fired from the Northern Song until about the middle of the Song dynasty, maybe a hundred years.” Those days the yield hovered around 30 percent. “These mountains are full of shards,” Qi Sifu said.

Qi Sifu honked at everything that moved: men, women, children, scooters, dogs, cats, and chickens. The ride took us longer than usual, having to slow through construction areas where a new highway was going up to connect the villages with the city. As the valley narrowed, a stream banked alongside us for a stretch before giving way to a set of narrow-gauge rails, for the coal train that ran from Jingdezhen to parts unknown. Then the valley widened, and we drove along a flat expanse of green fields that stretched to hills on the horizon. Qi Sifu veered onto a small road and then turned up a thin driveway. He parked in front of a mud hut, next to which rose a new multistory house with tiled walls and metal railings. Opposite the mud hut were undulating mounds of shards so large that it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the scale. The piles closest to the house had crevasses deep enough that people disappeared when they descended into them. Elsewhere swaths of vines, sesame blossoms, wildflowers, and small trees had taken root. Qi Sifu said plants grew well on shards because of all the ash and aerated soil.

“Oh, wah!” Kai E said, leaping out of the car. This was her first time seeing the shards, despite having lived less than an hour away for many years. “Let’s start picking!” She ran onto the piles and stooped to pick a few shards around her feet. “Wah, they even have designs on them!”

Qi Sifu, having grown up kicking shards and now ferrying visitors to see them, appeared bemused and slightly embarrassed by Kai E’s unbridled desire. “There are lots with designs!” he said. “Most have them. They aren’t worth much. Not worth picking up.”

“Wah, this is so different from the market,” Kai E said. “It’s like you’ve returned to the Song dynasty. I wish I could move these piles back home with me.”

Kai E disappeared over the hills, occasionally sending up a “Wah!”

“People come here to pick shards all the time,” Qi Sifu said to me, as if confiding with a fellow parent. “They sit with a stool and just look for pieces.”

As I climbed over the shifting piles, picking up pottery fragments that caught my eye, I was possibly the first person to handle them in a thousand years. Glinting among the earth tones of the saggers were shards of celadon in pale blues and greens and yellows, molded or incised with subtle but elaborate floral patterns, billowing like the clouds their colors recalled. The saggers had broken away like eggshells, by nature and by hand, to reveal the shiny, malformed embryos they contained. Orange and red dragonflies buzzed about, taking rests on the shards. Tiny frogs splashed in the rainwater that had collected in upturned saggers. The ground, moist with dew, felt spongy. The only sounds were the clink of pottery, birds chirping, and distant roosters crowing. Then came a series of explosions from the highway construction. “China is developing right now,” Ding said, laughing. “Too fast.” Beyond the piles I could see a row of concrete monoliths, sections of the new highway awaiting installation. The government had already begun hauling away some of the shards to make room for the highway.

I walked back to the van with a handful of shards and joined Qi Sifu. He stood with his arms behind his back and weight on one leg, aviator sunglasses taking up half his face. According to him, the area used to be even bigger, dozens of acres, and the pits we were exploring had all been dug by shard hunters. “The government ought to turn this into a tourist attraction, charge an entrance fee,” he said. “That would be nice. But they don’t care.

“My idea is to buy some land, move some of this over there, and put a replica kiln there, make it all like it was in ancient times,” he continued. “And you could open a teahouse, a restaurant, people could look at the shards, have tea, a meal. If I charged just ten RMB per person, I’d never spend it all in my life. But I don’t have the capital, and my shenfen is too small.” Shenfen means “identity” and is the same word in the Chinese term for “identity card.” It seemed that Qi Sifu’s time driving for foreign artists had laced his entrepreneurialism with Western sensibilities, but without a bigger name, or a white face, his strivings were bound to remain incremental.

On the way back to town, Qi Sifu described how he had learned the clay trade from his parents and worked the water hammers for seventeen years until he saved enough money to buy his van. “I didn’t want to do it anymore,” he said. “The pay was too low. My salary still isn’t great, but the life is better than doing clay.”

“Doing clay,” as Qi Sifu called it, is as dependent on the weather as farming, that bleakest of vocations in the Chinese mind. If the streams don’t get enough rain draining into them to run fat and fast, the water hammers—stone hammers powered by water wheels—don’t move, and clay isn’t made. According to Qi Sifu, the method for making clay in the San Bao valley has not changed since the Song dynasty. His family bought raw porcelain stone that had been mined nearby, pulverized it into powder, and washed it in several water pits. The finest, purest particles form a kind of scum on the surface, which is skimmed off into piles with the color and consistency of mantou dough and then formed into dunzi, or bricks, destined for porcelain workshops.

Every month during the rainy season, with a quartet of hammer mills going, Qi Sifu could produce about a hundred pounds per day. The year he quit, one ton of finished bricks fetched about 600 RMB, which meant that in one wet month of manual labor, he could gross a bit less than 1,000 RMB. Subtracting his material and hired labor costs, he took home about 500 RMB. During the winters the streams slow to a trickle and the work stops. Of the forty or so families that were making clay when Qi Sifu was young, a number that he said had not changed since the Song dynasty, only five or six remained.

Qi Sifu pulled over to show us the remnants of a Song dynasty bottle workshop. The highway was scheduled to run right through the site, and a clearing large enough to accommodate an eighteen-wheeler’s turning radius had been cut into the hill. From the road, there were no indications of a former kiln; the broken saggers that covered the hillsides looked like scree.

Unlike at the shard piles, it was difficult to envision the original landscape here. A football field’s worth of material had already been trucked away, yet the perimeter of the clearing was still crowded with ceramics. Qi Sifu pointed out where a dragon kiln had crawled up one hill, now a terraced trench of reddish earth. I climbed up into the kiln’s old belly and immediately found a broken spout. Only the outer layer of the dragon kiln’s bricks remained. The interior bricks, which would have been glazed, had all been scavenged. From my perch, I could see three cars with tinted windows on an outcropping on the other side of the road, parked together as if in conversation. I wondered who they were and if they were watching us.

“I remember I came here last year—it was still more complete,” Ding said. “Next year it’ll be gone.”

“They couldn’t have put the road a little this way or that?” I said.

“They don’t think like that,” Qi Sifu said. “There are too many of these old kilns. They’ve already saved Hutian, the ancient official kiln. That’s enough for them. They can’t save everything.”

The entire route back seemed to pass through Song or Five Dynasties–era kilns. Every mile or so Qi Sifu would point out another one, a few thousand square meters in size but usually unnamed and distinguished only by the wares that it produced. Even speeding by in the van, I could see the layers of shards exposed by rain and erosion.

We looped through town and then back up the San Bao valley to see Qi Sifu’s family’s hammer mill, which he now rented out. “Before I started driving, when I was working here, I hated it when people came to look,” he said. “It was such bitter work, and I didn’t like feeling like I was performing for these artists or videographers or television stations, who’d show the film and talk about how my life was so bitter. But I changed my mind. Now I wish for more people to see this, so they can see the history, see how hard they work, what goes into it. You have to have this environment to do this, and only this environment.”

One of the laborers, shirtless and with a receding hairline, was breaking down a pile of porcelain stone into smaller pieces with a mallet. Under the tiled roof of the mill, amid the arrhythmic thud of the hammers and the creak of turning wheels, his wife stood at a table made from a split tree trunk, forming clay dunzi. Balls of clay rested on the rafters like boules of bread. She scooped a lump from the pile on the table, kneaded it a few times, slapped it into a wood frame, and sliced off the excess with a wire strung on a bowed twig, which she returned to the pile. She disassembled the frame, extracted the dunzi, and added it, on its long edge, to the grid of curing bricks behind her. Then she reassembled the frame and began the process again.

There was a second pile of rocks, next to which lay a large, overturned stone base, from a column or statue, with a carved face. “What’s this?” Qi Sifu asked.

The man didn’t know. “A businessman just asked me to process them,” he said.

“Where’s it from?”

The man shrugged. “Nearby,” he said. “We’re going to make clay from it.”

Qi Sifu knelt to inspect the base. “This is an ancient stone artifact,” he said. “You’ve already picked off some of the carving.” He stood, shaking his head. “That’s too bad.”

DING DID SOME looking into the archives and reported back confused. San Yi Po claimed that her father had been Jingdezhen’s xian zhang, but Jingdezhen had always been a zhen, an administrative unit akin to a town, not a xian, or county. So the man in charge of Jingdezhen would have been a zhen zhang, not a xian zhang. Fuliang, where the Yuan had established the first government bureau, was the xian. Perhaps San Yi Po had mistakenly conflated Jingdezhen with Fuliang. I hoped a trip to Fuliang would make things clear.

Looking north as we crossed the Cidu (Porcelain Capital) Bridge, the river curved east, exposing green, unpopulated hills. To the south, squeezed between the serpentine bend of a new thoroughfare and the west bank of the river, were two of Jingdezhen’s oldest remaining streets, one dating back to the Ming and the other to the Qing, narrow lanes paved with stone slabs and lined with houses built from kiln bricks or wood. Down the center of the lane ran an aqueduct, covered with old stone tiles, smooth as river rocks and dipping in the middle, the result of hundreds of years of handcart traffic.

In my great-great-grandfather’s time, those streets led to one of the major wharves of Jingdezhen, bustling with businesspeople, customhouses, hotels, and markets. The Sanlu Temple, at the head of the lane, watched over a flotilla of merchant ships docked along the river, loading porcelain that would move downstream to Poyang Lake, the customs port of Jiujiang, and then on to the Yangtze, from which it would disperse all over China and the world. My great-great-grandfather’s collection likely passed through this very lane on its way to Xingang. Now all that remained of the old docks was a half-exposed stone ramp emerging from the water.

The ride to the Fuliang Gu Xian Ya, the ancient county government office, was shorter than I expected. Ding directed Qi Sifu past the turnoff for the tourist area and to the back of the adjacent village to avoid paying an entrance fee. We walked up a path, between houses, vegetable plots, and fruit orchards, and emerged at a 150-foot red pagoda, built during the Song dynasty atop a Tang dynasty temple. The women fanning themselves inside the pagoda told us there was nothing to see, so we walked on. Ding stopped to peer at the crumbling walls of a house built from stone and kiln bricks. “They tore down these houses after Liberation because they knew wealthy families hid gold and valuables in the walls,” he explained. “Liberation” was the mainland term for the events of 1949. “So I’m always interested in checking the holes in these walls.”

Now as then, a wall encircled the government complex at the center of Fuliang. Ding and I veered into the old cornfields outside the walls, looking for a place to enter. “There are shards everywhere!” he exclaimed. We studied the ground but couldn’t figure out where they might have come from; Fuliang had been an administrative and supervisory bureau, not a production center. “Oh, look,” Ding said. He picked up a coin with a square hole. It could have been anywhere from a hundred to a thousand years old.

There wasn’t any getting around the wall, so we returned to the main gate of the magistrate’s office, guarded by a thousand-year-old osmanthus tree and a crumbling brick wall under a metal awning that a sign indicated had once been a Song dynasty pavilion. I paid the entry fee while Ding waited at the gate. In the ceremonial hall, a woman operated a booth where visitors could have their photographs taken wearing Qing dynasty garb. I walked through every hall and room in the complex, realizing bit by bit that there was no archival material on site, yet never completely giving up on the idea.

On the way out, I paused in the ceremonial hall, where the names of all the Fuliang magistrates from the Tang dynasty through the Republican era were posted—some of the only historical information the place seemed to have. If my relative had been the xian zhang, his name would have been up on the wall. But I saw only a handful of Lius listed for the possible dates he would have served, and none of them were from Xingang or had the correct generation name.

I struck up a conversation with an older woman hanging out in the hall, fanning herself. She introduced herself as Mrs. Chen and said that she had come to Fuliang from Jiangsu with her parents when she was twelve. The ceremonial hall had functioned as an elementary school from 1954 to 1978, and she had attended in the 1960s. She called my attention to the rafters, where the beams still bore banners that had been posted during the Cultural Revolution, proclaiming slogans like “Long Live Chairman Mao” and “Defeat the American Imperialists.” After the school moved to a new location, the hall had been a fruit market and a sweets factory, among other things. It became a tourist spot about ten years ago, and all the buildings had been rebuilt in the past couple of years. The actual Fuliang archives that I sought were long gone, but Mrs. Chen didn’t know where they went.

The woman working the photo booth beckoned for my camera and offered to take a few pictures, posing me and Mrs. Chen at the magistrate’s desk. I thanked her and held my hand out for my camera.

“That’ll be ten kuai,” she said.

What could I do? I paid her ten kuai.

JINGDEZHEN WASN’T just full of ancient shards and ugly modern wares. Occasionally authentic, complete antique pieces could be found at the weekly market near the Shiba Qiao area, though it required wading through an acre of fakes. On the way back from the Song dynasty shard piles, Kai E overheard me talking about going to this market and insisted that I take along her husband, a painter and a market regular, to protect myself from getting ripped off.

I met Huang Fei, just as small as his wife, with a round forehead and large, elfish ears, at the entrance to the market just after dawn. The empty streets were quiet, so I heard the market before I saw it: the chimes of shards pouring out of fifty-pound rice sacks onto blankets or bare concrete.

Huang Fei came from Fengcheng, a village about a hundred miles southwest of Jingdezhen. His grandparents had been landowners, having made their money in the leather trade. His great-grandfather committed suicide during the land reforms following the 1949 Communist takeover. His grandfather was sold out to the Communists by a younger brother, jailed for eight years, and sent to work on a farm when he was released. Without any means to care for his family, he had to send Huang Fei’s mother away to be raised by another family. Huang Fei had always liked to draw, which wasn’t much use in the countryside, and had known of Jingdezhen only as the city with the strange name. In 1994, with only a middle school education, he came to Jingdezhen on the advice of an “uncle” who had just set up a factory making reproductions. “Before, I had no impression of porcelain at all,” he said. “It was just cups and bowls to us—what was so interesting about that? But then I got here and started falling in love with porcelain.”

At the reproductions factory, Huang Fei was put in charge of glazes and taught to paint. He had no qualms about copying. It didn’t even register with him. Orders were coming in, and he had to meet a quota every month. “I came from the countryside and got to paint,” he said. “I was happy with that.”

Four years later he happened to meet the same Canadian artist who had introduced Caroline Cheng to Jingdezhen, and invited him to his factory for a tour. The artist told Huang Fei that what he was doing wasn’t painting but copying. That the rebuke came from a laowai made its sting worse. “I was really uncomfortable when he told me that,” Huang Fei said. “So I left and found a blue and white painting teacher. Then I saw all the possibilities, doucai, fencai, while so many people were just doing the same thing over and over.” To describe his departure from the reproduction factory, Huang Fei used the term chulai, or “come out,” rather than the more common likai, or “leave.” I wondered if Huang Fei would really have left if not for a foreigner’s nudge, if that had really been the climax of his awakening or simply the inception, to which he had appended certain realizations in hindsight. Stories are told linearly, but life doesn’t unfurl that way.

He and Kai E had recently opened their own gallery, sometimes selling their work for thousands of RMB. In the back, Huang Fei kept the collection of antique porcelain he had found at the market. “People have been saying that Jingdezhen is dead since I got here,” he said. “ ‘This place is broken, there’s no future in porcelain,’ they said. But every month I’d see people putting out new things, so the tradition is still here.”

The biggest change he had observed over the past few years was the influx of foreigners. His gallery, as well as many others on the same street, owed its existence to Caroline Cheng. “Without her, this place would be so kepa,” Huang Fei said, using a word meaning “horrible” or “terrifying,” the same adjective one would use to describe a scary movie or gruesome crime. “I often compare Jingdezhen to this beautiful old house that was just festering and molding away, and then Caroline came and knocked open the windows and let all this light into it, totally changing it. Before her it was an wu tian ri”—a chengyu meaning both “complete darkness” and “a total absence of justice”—“and now it’s alive again.”

We turned a corner, and the bazaar unfolded. It wasn’t yet seven a.m., but the square was already foggy with the cigarette smoke of browsers and vendors. In the workshops surrounding the market, men sawed and hammered wood into frames for shipping vases taller than me. Chickens stepped through the shards on display. Women wheeled food carts around, squawking singsong, prerecorded advertisements through megaphones: “Dumplings! Roasted yams! Mantou!” Caroline had told me that when she first went to Jingdezhen, the inventory of shards being sold seldom changed; there was hardly any construction turning up fresh soil for people to scavenge. Now one could gauge the city’s projects based on the new shards showing up at the markets.

Huang Fei and I walked through the rows. The idea was to jian lou, literally “check for leaks,” or gather the things that had slipped out of someone’s net or bag. In other words, someone is always going to lose money on a transaction, and so better the vendor than me. There is a saying in Jingdezhen that, unlike gold or jade, porcelain has no price. Gold and jade are commodities with agreed-upon values. But porcelain depends on what one is willing to pay for it.

I saw Song celadon shards from Nanshijie, delicate blue and white fragments of teacups, chunks of cisterns, saggers glazed in lustrous purples. I had been told that although most of the shards in the market were indeed ancient, few were imperial, because the former imperial kilns were off-limits to hunters, and those vendors who did have imperial shards usually knew what they had. The majority of the shards with imperial marks on their bases were from much later periods, when emperors were too occupied with court intrigue, foreign incursions, and domestic unrest to care if a civil kiln misappropriated the royal seal, and the reign marks were applied not to trick customers but as homages to great periods of Chinese history (which is why Qianlong, Kangxi, and Yongzheng are such popular marks).

Beyond the shards lay blankets covered with old-looking, intact porcelain of all shapes, ages, and sizes. I had been warned that 99.9 percent of such items in the market weren’t what they purported to be. But that sliver of possibility of finding an authentic antique, something my great-great-grandfather might have owned, kept me searching, and I was determined—or desperate—enough to sift through all the fakes.

Fake Chinese antiques aren’t a new phenomenon. Already in 1712 Xavier d’Entrecolles wrote that Jingdezhen potters had perfected the “art of imitating old porcelain being passed for being three or four centuries old or at least of the preceding dynasty of Ming.” Copying was a Chinese tradition. The Yuan copied the Song, the Ming copied the Yuan, and so on. There was never any sense in ancient China that copying was a violation. They called it “standing on others’ shoulders to reach new heights.”

“All this copying, faking, lying to people—it’s a very ancient attitude,” Huang Fei told me. “They think if you can’t pick out the fake, it’s your fault. You’re the one with no education, no culture. And if you’re stuck with a fake, you’ll hide it away because you don’t want people to know you were taken. As long as people are involved, you’ll never cut out the problem. But with art, if you have real and fake, it’s more fun. Without fakes, it’s like a grocery store with determined prices. How interesting is that?”

To Huang Fei, it was all part of a game. Perhaps there is a reason the Chinese say they “play” porcelain instead of “collect.” “Sometimes we see people spend lots of money on a fake, we won’t say anything,” Huang Fei said. “Consider the loss their tuition. Everyone pays it.”

In fact, when I polled Jingdezhen students or locals about mustsee places in town, they often mentioned the Fang Jia Jing neighborhood (named for the Fang family but fittingly also a homonym for “to imitate”) near the railroad station, a whole village of workshops devoted to reproducing ancient ceramics. The entire history of China’s ceramics can be found in the Fang Jia Jing’s rows of shops selling Yuan blue and whites, Qing enamelware, or Ming meipings, every single one counterfeit. There is nothing secret about what happened in the Fang Jia Jing. The narrow alleys echo with the chimes of pumice stone working over porcelain to dull their finishes, after which vendors brush on thin brown paint and refire the pieces at low temperatures to achieve an aged tint. Counterfeiters set wares on a layer of rice husks to impart the faint red that was prevalent during the mid–Ming dynasty. And knead clay by foot, to add large air bubbles into the bodies so they would weigh the same as those created before machine mixing. And research clay, glaze, and firing recipes to match the methods and materials of previous centuries. Persian cobalt used in blue and white Yuan wares, for example, has high iron and magnesium content that results in iron spots where the glaze pools. They scavenge kaolin from the same mines that had supplied it for the original they are copying. They tumble objects in mud to study where wear and dust collect. Or they might build a new body onto an authentic base, which is why bases command the highest prices for shards. Some vendors even sink new objects into the sea to cover them with barnacles so they can pass them off as recovered shipwreck items.

“We don’t use ‘real’ or ‘fake’ with these things,” one student told me. “We use ‘old’ or ‘new,’ or ‘copy.’ It’s only fake if it’s not porcelain. They’re real. They’re just not the original ones. And only one person can own the original one. What about the rest of the people?”

Recently the Chinese have begun to use a new word to describe faked or copied products: shanzhai. Literally, shanzhai describes a fenced place in the forest, or a fortified mountain village. Metaphorically, it recalls mountain bandits, Robin Hood–like characters who evaded or opposed the authorities (acts that, given the famously corrupt Qing court, gained them the moral high ground) and stole from rich Mandarins. The idea of shanzhai has since spread to become a philosophical term for “rebel innovation.”

So if an entire nation of people don’t think something is wrong, then is it? It made me wonder just what was real, what were those objects I sought, and what their value was. How would I know the difference between my great-great-grandfather’s collection and a bunch of fakes? Not only had this stream of reproductions, like the rest of Jingdezhen’s history, never been cut—I fake, therefore I am—but they also represented some of the city’s highest-quality and greatest expertise. I recalled Takeshi’s advice to me about the antiques market. “The most important question you should ask is not ‘Is it real?’ ” he said, “but ‘Is it beautiful?’ ” Given the ends to which the counterfeiters pursue authenticity, and how that keeps alive Jingdezhen’s ancient traditions, it is kind of beautiful.

As we walked through the market, Huang Fei bought a ginger jar, a Song dynasty cup, and a bowl melted into a sagger. All the shard hunters were right about seeing a critical mass of ceramics. Despite all the items in the market, I had spent enough time looking at porcelain to roughly group them into periods and types, patterns of a larger tapestry. I started looking for interruptions in the pattern, and on our way out of the market, my eye caught something that didn’t belong: a large envelope adorned with crossed Kuomintang and Republic of China flags and official script and seals. Huang Fei and I immediately picked it up. “Jinling Museum Collection,” read the text, written right to left. Huang Fei turned the envelope over. A paper seal had been applied over the flap and read, “Republic of China National Palace Museum, Republic of China Nanjing Provisional Government.” Below that was a faded red stamp from the ministry of the interior.

The seller told us the envelope was one hundred RMB. “What’s inside?” I asked.

“Beats me,” he said. “What’s it say on it?”

According to the information on the envelope, it was an official packet from the collection of the National Palace Museum containing a piece of calligraphy by an early Qing dynasty scholar. Was this part of the National Palace Museum’s collection that Chiang Kai-shek had tried to keep from the Japanese, which might have explained why an ancient poem had been folded up into an envelope? If imperial porcelains could wind up in fields near Kaifeng during the frantic move, it seemed perfectly reasonable for a small envelope to find its way to a market in Jingdezhen.

“Can we see if there’s actually anything inside?” I asked.

“You can if you buy it,” the seller said. “You can do whatever you want with it after you buy it.”

Huang Fei and I had a quick, hushed discussion. “What do you think?” I whispered. “Could this be real?”

He examined the envelope, picking at the folds and seals to see if it had been artificially aged. “It might be,” he said. “This is a famous calligrapher. Even I’ve heard of him. But I don’t know anything about calligraphy. And I’m not sure about this envelope. It could be fake.” For a hundred RMB, it seemed worth the risk. We each put up fifty RMB and agreed to split any possible proceeds equally. My heart raced as we walked around the corner, and Huang Fei phoned a friend who was a calligraphy expert to tell him we had something for him to inspect. Unable to wait, Huang Fei opened the envelope. Inside, we found a two-foot square of heavy, gold-flecked paper stained the color of tea that unfolded to reveal a calligraphed poem. It could not have looked more fake. We had been taken. Huang Fei tore apart a corner of the envelope, and the interior seams were bright white, which he said proved that the envelope had been artificially stained. He called his friend to say we weren’t coming after all. We vowed not to tell Kai E about this. “That’s our tuition for the day,” Huang Fei said. “Don’t worry, I’ve paid a lot of tuition in my time. That’s the lesson—if you don’t know what you’re looking at, don’t buy it. Even if it’s only ten RMB, you’re wasting that money.”

ONE EVENING, as I sat with some friends in a bar in the Sculpture Factory’s courtyard, two women dressed in vacation chic walked in, and the taller one ordered a beer in the unmistakable accent of an ABC. Edie Hu was the Chinese ceramics specialist at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong, on her annual retreat to Jingdezhen to decompress in a Pottery Workshop studio and work on her burgeoning ceramics hobby. We were about the same age and had similar experiences with our Chinese-ness, and she offered to host me if I ever felt like attending an auction in Hong Kong.

We kept in touch and I eventually had saved enough for a trip. The Sotheby’s offices, on the thirty-first floor of the Pacific Place tower overlooking the sparkling waters of Victoria Harbor, felt light-years from Jingdezhen, yet many of Jingdezhen’s finest creations passed through here on their way to new owners. In the conference room, Edie brought out a selection of the best lots from the upcoming auction season. I was surprised to see her carrying the pieces—worth millions of dollars—in her bare hands. “I do worry sometimes about tripping or bumping into someone and dropping a priceless vase,” she said. “So I hold them really close.” When she walked around the office, she tucked them in the crook of her elbow like a football and kept her free hand ready to cover the exposed part or stiff-arm an inattentive colleague; women in the ceramics department also weren’t permitted to wear heels.

Edie’s grandfather had grown up in a wealthy banking family in Shanghai. Like my great-great-grandfather, he collected porcelain and lots of it. “During the twenties and thirties, you had access to really nice stuff,” Edie said. “The Qing dynasty was falling, so you could go to Beijing and buy imperial porcelain from the eunuchs—that’s how some of the great European collections got formed. My grandfather liked to buy monochromes, and in pairs, and he had to buy something every day.”

During the civil war Edie’s grandfather moved to Hong Kong, entrusting the Shanghai Museum with most of his porcelain collection. He intended to return for it but never did, and the new Communist government wasn’t interested in repatriating the belongings of landed gentry. Edie’s father left Hong Kong to study engineering at Stanford and settled in the Bay Area, where Edie was born and expressed the family’s porcelain gene. She graduated from Wellesley with a degree in art history and obtained a master’s degree in Chinese art and archaeology from the University of London before going to work at the Shanghai Museum, the National Palace Museum in Taipei, and then Sotheby’s. “We had some of my grandfather’s pieces at home, and as I got older, no one in my family could tell me anything about them,” she said. “My dad wasn’t interested at all, probably because he saw how my grandfather was so obsessive, always telling my dad to be careful around his things.” Her grandfather had good reason. In 1985 one of his Ming dynasty goldfish jars became the first porcelain object to break the $1 million barrier at auction.

We started in the Ming dynasty with one of the “star lots” of the upcoming auction, a fifteenth-century double gourd flask made during the emperor Xuande’s reign. Xuande was one of the first emperors to put reign marks on his porcelain, and his pieces were known for having a smooth clay body and tiny bubbles in the glaze, like the pebbling of an orange peel. Next, Edie brought out an extremely rare vase from the emperor Chenghua’s reign, designed with plantain leaves and floral motifs. The white was more intense, and the glaze was tighter, without the bubbling of the Xuande era. The reign mark had been defaced, but that didn’t affect the price, Edie said, which was estimated at 15 to 20 million Hong Kong dollars (2 to 3 million U.S. dollars). “The marks that matter are Qing dynasty ones,” she said. “With a Qianlong or Yongzheng mark, you can ask for premium prices. Without them, it’s just called ‘Eighteenth Century.’ ”

Perhaps because he was too devoted to his porcelain, Chenghua wasn’t a very good emperor. He had a domineering first wife, nearly twenty years his senior, who was so paranoid that she forced abortions or poisoned the mothers of Chenghua’s other children. Somehow one son managed to stay hidden for almost six years before Chenghua even knew of his existence, and he became Chenghua’s successor, the emperor Hongzhi. Hongzhi, a precocious child and brilliant student, lowered taxes and instituted transparency in government. Instead of killing corrupt officials and their families, he arranged for their safe passage home after their dismissal. He sought to end the practice of castration and the institution of eunuchs, and he redistributed the properties of deceased eunuchs to victims of flood, drought, and other natural disasters. He was also the only monogamous emperor in Chinese history, ensuring a clean, smooth succession. Unfortunately, his son turned out to be a reckless ruler who, despite spending most of his short reign smothering himself with drink and prostitutes, managed to undo just about all his father’s accomplishments before he died at age thirty.

By the end of the Ming dynasty, porcelain decorations had become loose, and the paint became stiffer, more mechanical. Porcelain quality—attention to detail, creativity, and technology—picked up again in the Qing, during Kangxi’s reign, and remained high until Jiaqing. The country was flush, the emperor poured money and resources into the industry, and craftsmen experimented relentlessly. Then porcelain declined during the Opium Wars and never recovered. Some high-quality pieces were made at the end of the Qing dynasty, notably under Cixi’s rule, but most were neither remarkable then nor highly collectible now. “You can see the rise and fall of China in the quality of the ceramics,” Edie said.

Most of the lots that Edie showed me had one or more old catalog stickers on them. The stickers had discolored and frayed over the decades and disrupted the otherwise pristine surfaces of the objects. “Do you remove them before the auction?” I asked.

Edie’s eyes widened. “Oh, no,” she said. “Some of these stickers are worth thousands of dollars in themselves. They’re one of the most important ways of proving provenance, showing that they belonged to an important or well-known collection. People try to reuse them or fake them all the time.”

The last piece Edie showed me was a blue and white Ming dynasty tankard about seven inches tall, scheduled for a Paris auction. It had been purchased at a flea market in France. The diaspora of Chinese antiquities often followed the foreign troops that were stationed in proximity to royal abodes. The French and English ransacked the Summer Palace during the Second Opium War, and during the Boxer Rebellion eight foreign legations had troops inside the Forbidden City. The Germans were closest to the hall of portraits, which was how many of China’s best paintings ended up in German museums and collections. The French were stationed near the hall where the imperial seals were kept, so imperial seals sometimes surfaced at markets in Paris or Lyon.

“The woman at the market was asking for something like one hundred twenty euro, and the guy who bought it bargained it down to sixty euro,” Edie said.

The tankard, listed in the catalog at 150,000 euro, would end up selling for 720,000 euro. It amazed me that despite so much demand and such readily available information, pieces like this could still appear. One of the most popular items for Jingdezhen’s porcelain imitators to reproduce was a white ovoid Qing dynasty vase adorned with pastel-colored famille rose peaches on a branch. Made during Yongzheng’s reign, the original vase wound up in the possession of the American ambassador to Israel, who used it as a lamp base for fifty years. When the Sotheby’s experts received a photograph of it—with lampshade and all—in the early 2000s, they rushed a team to New York, where the vase sat unprotected in the owner’s home. The shape was rare enough—they knew of only four in the world, and those were all blue and white; one with delicate pinks and vibrant greens was too rare to dream about. Thankfully, the seal on the base had not been drilled through, and the vase sold in Hong Kong in 2002 for $5.3 million to Alice Cheng, heiress to a soy sauce fortune, longtime Sotheby’s client, and mother of Caroline Cheng of the Pottery Workshop.

Stories like these are why auction houses scour the globe for new supply, and they sustained me every time I wondered if perhaps my family had been right, that it was foolish to think that I—illiterate, limited in vocabulary, without guanxi—could recover objects that had been buried three generations ago in a land where time passed like dog years. “One antique dealer I know doesn’t believe in these miracles, but I still do,” Edie said. “They’re out there.”

In November 2010 a small London auction house, Bainbridges, offered a Qianlong-era vase with reticulated double-walled peeka-boo sides revealing a smaller vase nested inside. The sellers claimed to have discovered it while cleaning out a dead relative’s attic and ascribed its provenance to an “adventurous uncle” who had been in China during the Opium Wars. They happened to see a flyer for Bainbridges and consigned the vase for auction. Bainbridges’ appraiser valued it between $1.2 million and $1.8 million. At auction, the sale went on for half an hour until the hammer came down for an anonymous Chinese buyer bidding by telephone. Taxes and the requisite buyer premium brought the final price to more than $80 million, the most ever paid for a Chinese antiquity.

Chinese interest in its own antiques began only recently. Until the 1980s little got into or out of China. People had no use for imperial porcelains, and the country wasn’t far removed from an era when it was dangerous to own anything besides utilitarian ware. Only once these items found their way to foreign collections did they become important symbols of China. “It took someone else to appreciate them to show that they were beautiful,” Edie said.

Now, spurred by nationalism and economic prosperity, the Chinese nouveau riche are fierce competitors for imperial porcelains. For many Chinese, winning auctions is an act in service of their country, repatriating stolen objects and a step toward undoing the humiliations that China suffered at the hands of invaders and would-be colonists. Sometimes it isn’t clear if the Chinese are more interested in owning their own art or in just keeping it away from the West. In 2009 an adviser for China’s national treasures fund placed the winning bid on two bronzes at a Christie’s auction and then refused to pay, just to sabotage the sale.

The Christie’s and Sotheby’s auctions in Hong Kong, long a preserve of stiff-upper-lipped expats, are overrun by armies of wealthy mainlanders with identical buzz cuts, leather loafers and man purses, long pinkie nails, and jade bracelets. Chinese auction houses have jumped into the game. Even the People’s Liberation Army is involved with an auction house. These Chinese auctions are the new Wild West. Nonpayment is so endemic that at some mainland auctions employees run up to the winning bidders as soon as the hammer goes down, to make them sign a promissory note, but even that doesn’t always work. One recent auction treated attendees to the absurd scene of an employee chasing a winning bidder through the salesroom with pen and paper. “They just don’t give a shit,” Edie told me. “They think that all these years they’ve been dumped on by the West and by their own government, and now finally, now that they have money to buy stuff, everyone is going to kiss their ass.” The laws literally don’t apply to many delinquent Chinese buyers, who have friends in the government to protect them. As for that $80 million Qing vase, less than six months after Bainbridges sold it to a Chinese buyer, the auctioneer canceled the sale for nonpayment.

One common tactic buyers use to worm out of paying is to dispute an item’s authenticity. As there are no widely used scientific methods, the age and authenticity of a piece is determined by an expert’s brew of knowledge, experience, and feel. But there isn’t exactly an uproar for any improvements. Too many people stand to benefit from a questionable piece’s inclusion in an auction. So even “genuine” objects with long, detailed provenances become such on the faith of their owners, appraisers, and prospective buyers—a kind of reality by consensus. The director of international operations for China’s largest private auction house told me that the faking in China is so pervasive that houses resign themselves to knowing that about 30 percent of their lots are fakes. “What’s real, in the end?” he said. “If my boss says something’s an obvious fake, but nine other people say it’s real, should he refuse to put it in auction?”

If independent experts can agree on a piece’s inauthenticity, Sotheby’s will cancel the sale and refund the money. The disputed objects get stashed at the office until the next wave of pieces come through, and are then moved to storage. If no one claims them, they become study pieces for authenticating other items. The Sotheby’s storage facility is full of unclaimed or unpaid-for pieces, an entire collection of expensive antique porcelain mired in limbo until someone acknowledges a piece’s existence by making good on the sale. Some of the orphaned lots disappeared into storage for so long that the storage fees owed for them outstripped their value.

And if even experts can’t distinguish between the counterfeits and the authentic antiques, I wondered what good it was to have the “real” thing. How sure could I be that the priceless porcelains on display at the National Palace Museums were authentic? What if my grandmother still owned a vase that she claimed to have belonged to my great-great-grandfather? Would I have believed her? Would that have been enough for me? Why did I insist on seeing everything for myself?

Caroline and Takeshi were right. Preserving history doesn’t mean saving historical things. What keeps art, and history, alive is the continuation of making, seeking, and transferring information. There aren’t enough vases in the world to contain one family’s past, much less the constellation to which it belongs. And finding my family’s porcelain would no better preserve its history than herding old craftsmen into a bamboo cage for tourists to watch. I still wanted to find the porcelain. But I began to understand that first I had to reconnect with the remaining links to my family’s history. Unlike Jingdezhen, however, the surviving members of my family could not live forever.

I GOT TO KNOW Caroline well enough to ask her for advice on digging for my family’s porcelain. She told me to find Jiang Yi Ming, the director of the ancient ceramics research center near the Long Zhu Pavilion in Jingdezhen. The research center had official permission to make digs, she said, and might be persuaded to help me. I hurried down to the research center, but the cleaning ladies at the doorway told me it was closed and shooed me away when I tried to ask when it would reopen. I retraced my route back to the five-story Long Zhu Pavilion, which I had seen many times but not yet visited. The pavilion had been one of the nerve centers of Ming dynasty Jingdezhen, and as recently as 1989 piles upon piles of imperial shards covered the area. A visitor could have collected as many rare imperial copper red fragments as he could carry.

Now bricks and sheet metal walled off the grounds to discourage shard hunters, and I had to buy a ticket to enter. The earth was spongy with ceramic material, a mélange of spacers, saggers, kiln bricks, tiles, and shards loosely bound by soil. Somehow this porous substrate managed to anchor two immense camphor trees, which the docent told me were three hundred years old. Other than the groups of men on the grounds playing cards and smoking, I was the only visitor.

The pavilion had been turned into a museum, though only the odd-numbered floors were open. But the display cases ringing the small rooms showed a good selection of Ming dynasty pieces from the Hongwu, Yongle, Xuande, and Chenghua eras: large blue and white vessels and chargers, fine copper red bowls and stemmed cups, small doucai cricket jars, and celadon meiping vases. The majority had been glued back together from shards, and there was a wonderful photograph of four men squatting over a shard-strewn courtyard in the ancient ceramic research center, pawing through the pieces in search of the right ones to complete the large, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle behind them: a blue and white cistern adorned with a dragon.

These objects on display, despite their visible imperfections and blank fillings where replacement pieces couldn’t be found, which might have been cobbled together from any number of different originals, captivated me. They weren’t representations of history, they were history, five-hundred-year-old visitors unearthed from beneath my feet, and in their travel to the present, they carried not just their own history but also mine. They were artifacts not just of their time but also of the time between us. These shards were what I dreamed of finding, just as much as my great-great-grandfather’s complete collection and certainly more than the imperial antiques in museums or auctions.

I love shards because they are as permanent as anything can be in China. Houses can disappear, textiles can disintegrate, and vases can be smashed. But no matter how much Jingdezhen and other former porcelain capitals build over their ancient foundations, shards will remain, and even if they manage to remove every last one of them, they will endure, somewhere. My great-great-grandfather’s porcelain might not be where he left it, or how he left it, but there was comfort in knowing that some things cannot be erased. And maybe those shards hold kernels of all the things that China has lost and could, over time, reanimate them.

The next morning I returned to the research center, a well-preserved Ming-Qing dynasty house with ivy-rimmed white walls and a large courtyard—the government always managed to get the best buildings. Groups of shards and saggers covered the courtyard and interior porch. Also on the porch were two men and a woman sitting on benches at a wooden table, a laptop computer and papers spread before them.

“What do you want?” one of them asked.

“I’m looking for Mr. Jiang,” I said.

“There is no Jiang here,” he said.

“Really?” I explained that I was visiting from America and had some questions about porcelain, emphasizing that Zheng Yi, Caroline’s Chinese name, had told me to come find the director, a Mr. Jiang Yi Ming.

“Yes, I know Zheng Yi,” said the other man, wearing denim shorts and a striped polo shirt and looking much friendlier than the first man. “But there is no one by the name of Jiang here.”

“Oh, well, sorry,” I said.

I left and sat outside by the entrance for a while, trying to think of what to do next. The man in the polo shirt came out to buy cigarettes. “Excuse me,” I said. “This is the ancient ceramics research center, isn’t it?”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “But we told you, there is no Zhang here.”

They had thought I had been saying “Zhang” the whole time. “No,” I said. “I’m looking for a Jiang.”

“Oh, Jiang!” the man said. “Yes, he’s here. He was the tall, thin guy at the table. Follow me.”

Mr. Jiang didn’t look happy to see me but gestured for me to sit down once I invoked Caroline’s name. Just as I was about to tell him the story of my family’s porcelain, his phone rang. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been called to a meeting. Maybe next time.”

“Can I come back later today?”

“Sure, come by later.”

“What’s convenient for you?” I asked. “I’ll work with your schedule.”

He didn’t answer, clearly not intending to make an appointment with me. I stared at him while he squirmed. “Uh, maybe eleven a.m.,” he said finally.

“Great,” I said. “I’ll wait for you.”

We stood. Mr. Jiang was half a head shorter than me and not particularly thin. “Well,” he said, “maybe we can walk and talk.”

He strode toward Zhushan Road, moving faster than I had ever seen a Chinese person walk, while I tried to keep up and ask about the possibility of digging. I wasn’t even sure if he was listening until he said, “You can’t just go digging willy-nilly.”

“I know, that’s why I’m asking—”

“We can’t, either,” he said. “We have to go do a careful investigation first. There are too many of these stories like yours. I suggest you go to the archives first, learn about your family, find the burial site, and find out about the site. Then come back. There are just too many of these stories.”

“There might have been imperial pieces,” I said, hoping that might get his attention.

“Go to the archives,” he said, shaking his head. “Just so many of these stories.”

“How do I check the archives?” We arrived at the Imperial Kiln Museum.

“Check the Jingdezhen archives on Lian She Road,” he said. “Everyone knows where it is.” He practically sprinted through the entrance of the museum.

When I found Lian She Road, a woman directed me up to the lotus pond at its terminus. At the pond another woman pointed to a dilapidated building across the street. “It’s that way,” she said. “See if they’re still there.”

They were not. The building’s roof had caved in, and its double wooden doors were padlocked. A motorcycle taxi driver waiting for a fare told me that the archives had outgrown the building and moved two years ago to Xinqiao, just east of the old city. I cursed Mr. Jiang and hired the driver to take me to the new archives, a narrow, six-floor concrete box near a tangle of train tracks. I wandered the floors until I ran into a man who told me to go to the fourth floor. All the doors along the hallway were closed, but I heard what sounded like a meeting behind the last one. A small man with a wide mouth eventually emerged. I introduced myself, and he invited me into his office. We sat on bamboo chairs, his feet swinging a few inches above the floor. His name was also Liu, but he was not from Jiujiang. “If you know this relative’s name, we can look it up, sure,” he said. “We’ll just check all the Fuliang records of xian zhang. It should be easy. Come back tomorrow morning, and we’ll look it up.”

Back at the Sculpture Factory, I recounted my experience at the research center to Ding. He didn’t seem surprised. “So they weren’t interested in helping,” he said. “But I guarantee if you’d had a laowai face, they’d have been willing to help.”

I returned to the city archives the next day, hoping to finally resolve the mystery of my great-granduncle, Ting Geng. Instead Mr. Liu said, “We can’t look this up. We only have post-Liberation records.” I didn’t bother asking why this contradicted what he had told me the day before.

“Have you gone to Fuliang yet?” he asked. “Fuliang has all the pre-Liberation records. They can look it up for you very easily. Let me make a call for you.” He phoned the records department in Fuliang and had a short conversation. He handed me a name, phone number, and address. “Go find Mr. Chen,” he said. “He’s expecting you.”

I went back to Fuliang, but this time to the archives, housed in a monumental tile-covered building with a slight curve in the middle. In the foyer hung two tile landscapes, under which a group of disinterested guards had gathered. I strode past the guards and up the stairs, where I found Mr. Chen.

Mr. Chen looked through the xianzhi, or county history. It was full of gaps, skipping entire decades. “Nope,” Mr. Chen said. “There are some other Lius, but no one named Liu Ting Geng.”

“What if he wasn’t a commissioner but a minor official who worked in the government?”

“That’s not in here. I can’t look that up. If he did any important work, it may have been recorded—you could check the Qing records. But if he was just a regular guy, it wouldn’t be recorded.”

What was I expecting? A proper archive with acid-free paper and white gloves? Instead, I got a few minutes to glance through a book published in the 1990s. Mr. Chen brought me tea in a plastic cup so thin it seemed ready to melt. He stepped out to have a smoke, leaving me to flip through the history book, which contained mostly census information and mostly from after 1949.

Mr. Chen stepped back into the room. “Hey, tell you what, I’ll try to look through the Liu family history for you,” he said. “I’ve looked through a lot of them but never Liu. If I find anything, I’ll let you know.” We exchanged contact information, and I left him the names to look up. “You can’t rush these things,” he said. “If you were in a hurry to find them, you couldn’t do it. These things take time. But I’ll see what I can find.” I never heard from him, but it was exemplary treatment from a bureaucrat.