Yaoli sits where Jiangxi meets Anhui, in the mountains, its centre spread along a valley floor at roughly two hundred metres above the sea. The Yao River is the only large river in the area and runs north to south straight through the middle of the town. The name is old, and the town was founded in the late Western Han, but the reason it is known is the ground underneath it: this is where the white kaolin clay that Jingdezhen's kilns needed came from.
From the journal
Where the clay came from
Before the kilns drew their clay from elsewhere, the workshops of the whole region worked the white earth of this valley.
In the same city · Jingdezhen ↗A town in a valley at two hundred metres
When the potters left
Before the Ming, Yaoli was the centre of ceramic production for the whole Jingdezhen region. In the Ming and especially the Qing, large-scale mining of the Gaoling deposits here drained the reserves; the raw material ran short, the workshops could not carry on, and the potters and the ceramic workers moved south to the city on the Chang River. A town can lose its industry and keep its name. Yaoli kept both the name and the reputation, and calls itself the source of porcelain, the home of tea and the sea of forest.
The other Yaoli
There is a second town called Yaoli in Jingdezhen, in Gao Ling township of Fuliang County, and the two names are not the same place. The kiln town here sits in the mountains at the provincial border, and the ceramic history of the region is spread across it: the kaolin in the east, the timber for firing in the forest, the water of the Yao River, and the kilns themselves down the valley in the city. Reading them as one connected landscape, rather than as a single monument, is what makes the craft legible.