About — Blue Fir

Why We Exist

A visitor to a porcelain market in Jingdezhen once picked up a cup, turned it over in his hands, and said:

“It’s very good. But I can’t read it. I don’t know what the pattern means, or what makes it good.”

That sentence captures much of why Blue Fir exists.

Jingdezhen still holds an extraordinary depth of knowledge — in form, material, glaze, painting, firing and use. But once an object leaves the city, much of that context can disappear with it.

Blue Fir selects exceptional porcelain, but selection alone is not enough. We also want to make the knowledge around each object visible, so that people can understand what they are holding, how it was made, and why it matters.

Selection gives the object a place. Understanding gives it a life.

Why Jingdezhen

Jingdezhen is not simply where we source porcelain. It is the environment that makes Blue Fir possible.

For more than a thousand years, knowledge here has accumulated through materials, kilns, workshops, families, specialist crafts and repeated experimentation. That knowledge is still active today.

Our team works from inside this environment. We visit studios, handle objects, compare work, follow techniques, learn from makers and see how porcelain is produced before it reaches the collection.

Proximity matters.

What Blue Fir adds is careful judgment, documentation and a way for that knowledge to remain connected to the objects when they leave Jingdezhen.

People & Perspectives

Blue Fir is shaped by different ways of knowing Jingdezhen.

Some of us grew up here. Others arrived later and stayed. Some work with clay, glaze, painting, tea, history, selection or production. Each perspective reveals another part of the city.

A Jingdezhen Perspective

Linling

Co-founder

I was born in Jingdezhen. As a child I lived in the old town, where the alleys were narrow and lined with workshops. Mornings began with the sound of throwing wheels; on the way home from school I stepped aside for craftsmen carrying saggars. None of it seemed special. This was simply the city I knew.

Only later did I begin to understand what surrounded me. For centuries, porcelain made here had travelled far beyond Jingdezhen — down the Chang River, onward to the coast, and eventually into homes and collections across the world.

Recently I walked through a porcelain market with a European client. He picked up a cup, turned it over in his hands, put it down, and told me he could see it was good — but that he could not read it.

That stayed with me.

Jingdezhen still contains an extraordinary depth of knowledge, but once an object leaves the city, much of that knowledge can disappear with it.

That is one of the reasons we founded Blue Fir.

Centuries ago, porcelain from Jingdezhen travelled across the world. I want it to travel again with its meaning intact — not simply as decoration or as a name from history, but as a cup, a bowl, a vessel that becomes part of someone’s daily life.

So that the kiln fires that have burned here for a thousand years continue to be seen.

An Outside Perspective

Renco Verhoef

Co-founder

Tradition is not a style.
It is accumulated judgement.

Renco came to Jingdezhen from outside and stayed.

Over the years, what first appeared as a historic porcelain city became something much more immediate: a living network of studios, makers, tea houses, craftsmen, families and specialist knowledge.

What interested him most was not the preservation of old forms for their own sake, but the way knowledge remains alive through practice. A glaze is understood by firing it again and again. A form becomes better through making, using, comparing and correcting. Much of what matters in good craft cannot be separated from the hands, eyes and judgement of the people doing the work.

For Renco, this is what a living tradition means.

Tradition is not a fixed style to be reproduced. It is accumulated knowledge that remains useful because it can still respond to the present. The best work respects what has been learned before, without becoming trapped by it.

Respect for tradition does not mean that every inherited solution must remain unchanged. A form can be refined, a proportion corrected, a glaze reconsidered. Continuity matters, but so does improvement.

He values craftsmanship when skill is visible not as decoration, but as control: in proportion, weight, balance, surface, firing, touch and use. Handwork does not make an object good simply because it is handmade. What matters is whether the maker understands the material deeply enough to make deliberate choices — and whether those choices make the object better.

That kind of judgement is rarely invented from scratch. In Jingdezhen, it has often been refined across generations through repeated making, failure, correction, comparison and transmission from one pair of hands to the next. The result is a sensitivity to material and proportion that cannot simply be copied by reproducing a technique or imitating a form.

This is what makes the tradition living. It does not survive through history, museums or old forms alone, but because people still possess the skills, judgement and material understanding needed to make exceptional work now. If that knowledge disappears, the living tradition disappears with it.

This is also why use matters. A cup should not succeed only in a photograph or display case. It should feel right in the hand, pour well, hold heat appropriately, age well and become familiar through repeated use.

Blue Fir grew from that conviction: that Jingdezhen’s accumulated knowledge should remain active. Not by copying the past, but by allowing skilled makers to continue working from it, questioning it and adding to it.

A tradition stays alive when it can still create something worth using now.

More voices from Jingdezhen will be added here over time — makers, painters, kiln specialists, studio owners and others whose work helps shape what Blue Fir becomes.

What Connects Us

Some perspectives begin with childhood familiarity, others with years of looking, learning and staying. Others will come from the wheel, the kiln, the brush, the glaze room or the tea table.

Blue Fir brings those perspectives together — not to reduce Jingdezhen to a single story, but to help more of its knowledge travel with the objects themselves.

Choosing well. Understanding what we choose. Helping others understand what they hold.

Where We're Going

Blue Fir exists to support the continued life of Jingdezhen porcelain through careful selection, honest presentation, long-term studio relationships and the continued development of new work.

We are not trying to grow as quickly as possible. We want to grow without lowering the standard — one object, one studio relationship and one body of knowledge at a time.

We also want Blue Fir to remain open: to new makers, new perspectives and new ways of understanding Jingdezhen.

A living tradition should remain capable of becoming something new.

Welcome to Jingdezhen.

Continue the Walk

Explore the Collection →Discover Jingdezhen →Learn to Read Porcelain →Read How We Work →

About Blue Fir

Linling

Renco Verhoef