Fúliáng

Fuliang lies in the hills of northeastern Jiangxi, where the Chang River runs out of the mountains of Anhui toward Lake Poyang. The county was called Xinchang until 742, when it took the name Fuliang, 'floating bridge', because the stream often flooded and local people felled timber to bridge it. Its tea trade was famous by the Tang: the poet Bai Juyi wrote of a merchant who had gone off to Fuliang to buy tea.

Fuliang's lasting importance came from the kilns of Jingdezhen, which lay within its bounds. Under the Yuan, a porcelain bureau at Fuliang supervised the kilns, and in 1295 the county was raised to a department. The blue-and-white wares fired there from the early fourteenth century, painted with cobalt, found buyers from the Mongol realms to the Indian Ocean. After the Ming restored Fuliang to a county under Raozhou in 1369, the court set up an Imperial Kiln Factory on Zhushan hill, whose best pieces were reserved for the palace and defective ones smashed on the spot. Private kilns grew up around it and sent porcelain down the river system by boat.