Passage2

It’s Saturday morning and the town' s creative items are packed into a large courtyard Young designers sell their creations, from elegant tea sets to hand-painted earrings I imagine myself in London, until Chinese tones brought me back in reality, that is I'm in Jingdezhen, a city in Jiangxi Province in China.

The term “Made in China” typically brings to mind poor-quality products, but that wasn' t always so. Centuries ago,China was the world’s artistic center, known for fine and beautiful wares,When Europeans first saw Chinese pottery, they thought it must have been made with magic and called it “white gold" .

They couldn’t find out how it was made, but they knew it came from a town called Changnan Two million years later, the town, now called Jingdezhen, is still one of the world’s most important centers for pottery production .

"The people are the most important treasure here, their roots are deep in histoiy," says Jia Zhang, a student I met later at the Pottery Workshop. She's part of many designers who have come to Jingdezhen to learn techniques handed down over a hundred generations ago.”This is the best place to study pottery in China, perhaps in the entire worid," Jia Zhang adds.

Chinese artists aren't the only ones drawn here Founded in 2005, the Pottery Workshop runs , classes places for visitors from around the world and tours. In the Pottery Workshop’s second floor, I meet a couple from Canada, who are frequent visitore here We are fascinated byJingdezhen because everyone is so specialized-a piece can pass through 70 different hands, the husband says.

()make the writer realize that he is in China