Jiangxi in Eight Days: the Mountain, the Kiln and the Villages

["We start on the bank of the Gan. The Pavilion of Prince Teng was raised here in 653 by a young prince of the Tang, and everything standing now is a reconstruction - the latest one completed in 1989 to a Song-dynasty design - because the tower has burned and been rebuilt on this bank again and again. What never had to be rebuilt is the prose: Wang Bo's preface, written in 675 when he was in his twenties, is the reason Chinese children still memorise the name. Your guide reads the couplet on the threshold with you - 'the fading sunset flies with the lonely egret, the autumn water merges with the wide sky' - and then you take the lift to the upper galleries, where the Gan is a kilometer of brown water below you and the new city stands on the far bank.", "After lunch we cross to the old town. The Memorial Hall of the August 1 Uprising occupies the building where the rising was planned in 1927, an event the People's Liberation Army counts as its founding; the halls are free but timed entry has to be reserved in advance, and we do that for you. It is a short, dense museum and worth an hour.", 'The afternoon belongs to the Jiangxi Provincial Museum on the north bank. Its collection is built on two things the province does better than anywhere else: bronze, from the Wucheng culture of the Shang period, and porcelain, from the kilns that eventually became Jingdezhen. Entry is free with a reservation. We finish at the riverside as the light goes, when the tower on the far bank lights up.']

We collect you at Jiujiang station or Lushan station - the high-speed line from Nanchang takes under an hour - and drive to the cable-car base station. The car climbs the north face in about seven minutes and saves you the four hundred bends of the road, which is not a scenic drive so much as a test of stomachs. You step out into Guling, a town of some twelve thousand people on a shelf of the mountain at roughly 1,100 meters, laid out from the 1890s by missionaries and consular officials who wanted somewhere cooler than the Yangtze valley in August.

That history is the reason the town looks the way it does: stone villas with red roofs, a church, a cinema, and streets that climb. We walk Lulin Lake, the Flower Path - named for Bai Juyi's spring poem - and then the Jinxiu Valley ridge path, which runs along the cliff with Poyang Lake somewhere below in the haze. Lushan was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as a cultural landscape in 1996, and the reason is this mixture: a mountain that has been read, painted and built on for sixteen centuries.

The shuttle bus inside the park is included and runs on a loop; we use it rather than walking the road between sites. Evening in Guling is cool even in July, which is the whole point of the place.

Sandie Spring is the waterfall everybody comes for, and it costs you: the descent is a long flight of steps into a side valley, and the climb back out is the same steps. It is about an hour down and a shade longer up, with a cable car available on part of the route if your knees would rather. The water comes off the cliff in three separate drops, which is where the name comes from, and the pool at the bottom is the coldest thing you will put your hand into all summer.

In the afternoon we take the ridge to the Five Old Peaks, the row of summits on the east side that look, from a distance, like the heads of five men. The path is stone steps most of the way and the view from the top runs out over Poyang Lake, China's largest freshwater lake, on a clear day.

We finish at the White Deer Grotto Academy at the foot of the mountain. It began as a Tang scholar's retreat, acquired its name from a white deer he was said to keep, and became one of the four great academies of the Song after Zhu Xi rebuilt and taught here in the 1170s. The buildings sit in a pine valley beside a stream, and it is quiet in a way the mountain above it is not.

We start in the middle of town at Taoyangli, the block that holds the excavated remains of the imperial kiln. From the early Ming onwards this works supplied the court, and the system was brutal in its precision: tens of thousands of pieces fired, a small fraction accepted, the rest broken and buried on the spot so that nothing substandard could reach the market. Archaeologists have dug up those rejects, and a great deal of what you see in the museum here is porcelain that was smashed on purpose and then fitted back together.

The Imperial Kiln Museum beside it is built as a row of brick vaults, shaped like the kilns they came from, and it holds the reassembled pieces: the Yongle and Xuande wares, the blue-and-white that made the town's name, and the single-color glazes that only the court was allowed to commission.

After lunch, the China Ceramics Museum - the national collection, free but reserved - which is the place to see the whole arc in order. We end at Taoxichuan, a state porcelain factory complex from the 1950s with its chimneys and sawtooth roofs intact, now full of studios, shops and a night market. It is the best place in the city to buy, because the people selling are usually the people who made the work.

The Ancient Kiln Folk Customs Quarter keeps the process alive rather than behind glass: workshops where you watch a thrower center and pull a bowl in under a minute, painters who lay cobalt onto unfired white bodies, and the kilns themselves - a dragon kiln, a mantou kiln, a gourd kiln - still fired on a schedule. The ceramic orchestra plays instruments made entirely of porcelain, which sounds like a novelty and is not: the material rings, and the set is tuned.

Then the drive east to Yaoli. The road follows the river into the hills, and the reason this corner of Jiangxi matters is buried in the ground beside it: Gaoling village, a few kilometers on, gave its name to kaolin, the white clay without which none of this works. Porcelain is clay plus kaolin plus feldspar, fired hot enough to vitrify, and Europe spent centuries trying and failing to copy it because it did not have this.

Yaoli itself is a river town of Ming and Qing houses, a single stone street and a covered bridge, with the old kiln sites up the side valleys. It is quiet on weekdays. We walk it, eat beside the water, and drive back to Jingdezhen in the evening - or continue to Wuyuan, which is under two hours on.

Huangling sits a few hundred meters up a hillside in the south of Wuyuan, and it was half abandoned before it was restored - the young had gone, the terraces had gone with them. What brought it back was the thing you photograph: shaiqiu, the autumn drying. Chillies, corn, pumpkin, rice and chrysanthemum get spread on round bamboo trays and set out on every ledge, roof and windowsill because there is no flat ground to do it on. It is not a performance put on for visitors; it is what people do with a harvest in a village built on a slope.

You take a cable car up. Inside, the village is Huizhou architecture: white limewashed walls, black tile, horse-head gables, and a main street that steps down the contour. The terraces below it are the other half of the picture - rapeseed in March and April, which is when the place fills, and green rice for the rest of the summer.

We keep you here into the late afternoon. The tour buses leave around four, and the light after that is better anyway.

Sanqing Mountain was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2008 for its granite and for what the ice and the rain have done to it. The peaks are pillars and blades of stone standing out of forest, and the reason people photograph them is that cloud sits in the valleys between, so the summits appear to float. The name means 'three pure ones', after the three Taoist deities the summits are said to resemble.

We take the Jinsha cable car up the east side rather than walking, which turns a half-day of climbing into fifteen minutes and leaves the day for the mountain itself. The South Garden loop is the classic circuit: the Python Emerging from the Mountain, a rock column some 120 meters of stone standing on a narrower base, and the Goddess of the East, a pillar that does, from the right angle, look like a seated figure with her hands folded.

The path is boardwalk and stone stair over about four hours at an easy pace, with the high-altitude plank walk along the cliff as the optional addition if you have the legs and the weather. Your gate ticket carries a fingerprint and is valid for re-entry the following day, which is what makes the two-day version of this trip work.

It is worth being straight about what Wangxian Valley is. It is not an old village; it is a gorge that was developed as a scenic area, with buildings set into the cliff on timber frames in the style of the region's stilt houses, a street of workshops, waterfalls, a glass walkway and a very deliberate lighting scheme. It became famous through photographs, and the photographs are accurate.

The day part is the valley itself: you walk up beside the water, past the falls, and then along the cliff to the stilt houses, which overhang the drop on timber posts. There is rafting on the lower water in season, and the craft street does pottery, indigo dyeing and ironwork, most of it genuinely being made rather than shipped in.

The reason to stay overnight is the evening. The lights come on along the cliff houses and the whole gorge changes, and the day visitors leave between four and six. Staying inside the scenic area also means you do not queue for the shuttle down. We take you up in the late morning, keep you through the afternoon, and hold you there after dark.