### Hero
**A city made of porcelain, open online.**
Cidu is a living market of handmade ceramics from Jingdezhen, China — the porcelain capital of the world. Every day, a new stall opens.
---
### The Name — A City Made of Porcelain
In Jingdezhen, nobody says "I'm going to buy porcelain." They say, "I'm going for a walk."
Jingdezhen has two faces. By day, behind the glass windows of Taoxichuan, there are hands pulling clay, hands glazing, hands painting cobalt blue — young makers keeping watch over their studios, each piece passing through weeks of kneading, throwing, and firing. But when evening falls, the city truly wakes. As darkness sets in, the stallholders wheel out their carts, lamps flicker on one by one, and tables fill with cups, bowls, and vases fresh from the kiln. Follow the lights, and every table is a maker's own world.
This city has carried a name for over a thousand years — the Porcelain Capital. In the local tongue, it is spoken as **Cidu**.
**"Ci"** — porcelain — is its very bones. From the Song dynasty to the Ming and Qing, the kilns of Jingdezhen never once went cold. Europe's courts called Jingdezhen porcelain "white gold," and a single ship from this small city could set half the royal houses of Europe waiting.
**"Du"** — capital — is its embrace. Jingdezhen was never the city of a single master. It holds dozens of glazes, hundreds of styles, and thousands of makers, each their own world, yet together one city.
That is the name we carry — and the city we invite you to step into.
---
### Why Cidu — The Hands Behind the Porcelain
In Jingdezhen, there is a certain kind of person.
Some have painted blue-and-white porcelain for thirty years, their brush moving from memory alone. Others keep watch over wood-fired kilns in the mountains, staying awake for three days to read the temper of the fire. And there are the young, fresh out of the ceramics academy, kneading contemporary sculpture into clay, making forms no one has made before.
Their hands are the true inheritors of Jingdezhen's thousand-year flame.
But most of them work quietly. A handmade teacup that took half a month to make may be priced at just a few dollars. A vase into which a maker poured their entire aesthetic is bought by middlemen, labeled under someone else's name, and sold overseas for ten times the price — while the artist never learns where their work went, and never receives the value it deserved.
Jingdezhen has no shortage of craft. What it lacks is a window through which the world can see that craft directly.
That is why we built Cidu — not just another shop selling porcelain, but a bridge. On one side: every maker in Jingdezhen who makes things with care. On the other: people across Europe and around the world who understand the beauty of handmade work.
---
### How It Works — A Market That Opens Every Day
Cidu is not a catalog. It is a market.
Every maker has their own stall. Through words and photos, we tell you who they are, what they are making, and what has just come out of their kiln today. Just like a real market in Jingdezhen, the stalls refresh every morning — a wood-fired teabowl from one kiln today, a vase in a blue so deep it doesn't seem real from another maker tomorrow.
When you buy from Cidu, you are not buying from a warehouse. You are buying directly from the hands that made it — and every piece can be traced back to those hands, and to the story of how it came to be.
---
The kilns of Jingdezhen have burned for a thousand years. We built Cidu so their light could travel a little further — and so the people who tend those fires could finally be seen, and rewarded, by the world.
Come stroll the market. See who's set up today.
**Cidu. Let the hands of Jingdezhen be seen by the world.**