UNESCO Adds China's Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites to World Heritage List

On July 25, 2026, UNESCO added China's Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites to the World Heritage List, making it China's 61st World Heritage site. The 1,979-hectare property, with a 5,545.7-hectare buffer zone, represents a handicraft porcelain industry system developed in Jiangxi Province from the 10th to the 19th century. The same day, Tencent announced the launch of Digital Jingdezhen: Porcelain Craft Adventure. According to the company, the game uses AI-assisted procedural content generation to recreate Jingdezhen's five major porcelain heritage sites and features AI digital humans built on large language models and a multimodal dataset containing more than 30,000 documentary records.

Jingdezhen UNESCO World Heritage inscription

• ▪UNESCO added China's Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites to the World Heritage List on July 25, 2026, during the 48th session of the World Heritage Committee in Busan, South Korea.
• ▪The inscription of the Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites brings the total number of World Heritage sites in China to 61.
• ▪The Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites property comprises five parts: the Town Area Porcelain Production Center, the Hutian Ancient Kiln Site, the Gaoling Porcelain Clay Mining Site, the Changling Porcelain Stone Mining Site, and the Jiaotan Firewood Production Area.
• ▪The Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites cover an area of 1,979 hectares, with a 5,545.7-hectare buffer zone, representing the industrial system developed in Jiangxi Province from the 10th to the 19th century.

Digital Jingdezhen AI-powered heritage game

• ▪Tencent announced the launch of Digital Jingdezhen: Porcelain Craft Adventure, an AI-powered cultural heritage game, on July 25, 2026; the company said the launch coincided with the UNESCO inscription.
• ▪According to Tencent, Digital Jingdezhen: Porcelain Craft Adventure features AI digital humans built on large language models and the Jingdezhen Porcelain Cultural Heritage Multimodal AI Dataset, creating interactive experiences intended to make historical knowledge tangible and relatable.

Jingdezhen Porcelain Multimodal AI Dataset

• ▪Tencent said it applied Optical Character Recognition, Natural Language Processing, and knowledge graph technologies to transform dispersed historical records, heritage information, and craft specifications into structured digital resources.
• ▪Tencent said it developed the Jingdezhen Porcelain Cultural Heritage Multimodal AI Dataset, which contains more than 30,000 documentary records, over 5,000 ceramic gene specimens, and data on nearly 1,000 representative ceramic artifacts in collections worldwide.

Procedural content generation technology

• ▪According to Tencent, the Procedural Content Generation technology maps town layouts and automatically generates architectural structures, decorative elements, and pedestrians to recreate Jingdezhen's historic townscape digitally.
• ▪Tencent said Digital Jingdezhen: Porcelain Craft Adventure uses AI-assisted Procedural Content Generation to create what the company described as the first large-scale digital recreation of Jingdezhen's five major porcelain heritage sites and historical production scenes.

Digital Heritage Guardian volunteer program

• ▪Tencent said it developed the Digital Heritage Guardian (Jingdezhen), a volunteer program within the Weixin ecosystem intended to enable the public to support the upkeep and stewardship of physical heritage sites.

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