Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada married East and West here in 1920, founding the studio-pottery tradition the whole English-speaking world descends from.
The oldest pots anyone has found come from Xianrendong Cave in Jiangxi, southern China. Hunter-gatherers fired them about 20,000 years ago and cooked in them, perhaps boiling clams and snails, some ten thousand years before farming reached the region. The wheel came far later; many scholars credit the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, and a stone potter’s wheel from Ur is dated to about 3129 BC. The same province is where the craft is most alive today. Jingdezhen made porcelain from the Song dynasty to the Qing, and its imperial kilns served the court. In July 2026 its handicraft porcelain sites became the first World Heritage site themed on porcelain, and the city counts more than 60,000 jingpiao, makers who moved there, thousands of them from more than 60 countries.
Learn studio pottery where Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada founded the tradition in 1920.
One pottery, and it is the one the English-speaking studio tradition descends from, running courses and residencies in the founder's own studio. That is lineage rather than a scene: no count of who works in the town now, nothing published outside the pottery, and nobody of ours has been.
Living sceneVerified schoolsHeritageUnbroken lineageBernard Leach's historic St Ives studio, now a working pottery and museum, running multi-day adult throwing courses, the year-long 'Leach Year' programme and national/international residencies in the Leach-tradition (residencies resuming 2027 during building works).
Facts read on the school's own pages, 8 Oct 2026.
Recognized studio apprenticeship completion or college diploma in ceramics (e.g. Leach/Mashiko lineage, MA Ceramics) · Certifying body: Apprenticeship / studio-residency lineage (no single global body)
There is a real difference between a school that teaches you and a good-looking website, and too much of the internet is the second kind. Four instruments do the work, and every one of them is visible on the page you are already on.
If a place dodges these, that's your answer. It costs you nothing to ask, and it tells you everything.
This is the short version. The full method is here — the six questions, in order, for any craft anywhere.