Players can try their hand at porcelain-making and craft their own one-of-a-kind ceramic pieces in the mini-game, Digital Jingdezhen: Porcelain Craft Adventure. CHINA DAILY

The game's goal seems simple enough: become a master porcelain maker.

When the loading screen fades, players find themselves in a virtual Jingdezhen, the Chinese city located in Jiangxi province, whose kilns supplied emperors, merchants and royal courts around the world for centuries. Before touching a lump of clay, however, a few more pressing questions come to mind.

Why should I become a master potter?

"Because every piece of porcelain, from mud to fire, is in your hands," an elderly kiln master replies. "What you make speaks for you."

How do I get there?

He says: "Start by kneading clay and throwing it on the wheel. Then learn painting, glazing, and tending the kiln. Every step matters."

Where should I learn?

"If you want to understand porcelain," he answers, "there is nowhere else."

The voice belongs to the owner of Zhiyi Kiln, an AI-powered master potter in Digital Jingdezhen: Porcelain Craft Adventure, a mini-game released on the same day UNESCO inscribed the Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites on the World Heritage List.

More than a guide, the virtual craftsman serves as a teacher and storyteller, answering players' questions — including some unexpectedly difficult ones — as they progress from novice apprentices to skilled artisans. Along the way, they also discover the long history of Jingdezhen's ceramic industry and its centuries-old links with the Maritime Silk Road.

The mini-game is inspired by Jingdezhen's UNESCO World Heritage bid. CHINA DAILY

On July 25, delegates gathered in Busan, South Korea, for UNESCO's 48th World Heritage Committee session, where the Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites became China's 61st World Heritage site.

Soon after the announcement, Tencent Games and Tencent's SSV Digital Culture Lab, working with local authorities in Jingdezhen, launched what they describe as the world's first official game created for a newly inscribed World Heritage site to combine artificial intelligence with gameplay.

Rather than simply reconstructing an ancient city, the project re-creates the site's five heritage zones, 24 major production sites and workshops, dozens of historically documented tools, and more than 70 celebrated porcelain styles spanning multiple dynasties.

"If World Heritage status were the finish line," says Tu Ming, the game's producer, "there would be no need for this game.

"Jingdezhen's greatest heritage is a worldview about how people live with nature and create together. That shouldn't belong only to scholars or artisans. Everyone should be able to experience it."

Unlike many World Heritage sites, Jingdezhen is not a frozen monument preserved behind ropes or glass. It has produced porcelain continuously for more than a thousand years, sustaining an interconnected system of raw materials, kilns, workshops, transport routes, and generations of artisans.

That living ecosystem became the guiding principle behind the game's design. Players' very first task is to plant Masson pine trees.

One chapter traces the origins of blue-and-white porcelain. CHINA DAILY

The game, in Chinese, explains that the resin-rich wood burns quickly and has fueled Jingdezhen's kilns for centuries. By encouraging players to grow forests first, it underscores a simple lesson: sustainable woodlands are the foundation of a thriving porcelain industry.

Only after collecting essential materials, such as timber, porcelain stone and glaze, can players begin firing ceramics. They can use AI to transform uploaded images into porcelain designs, shape clay on virtual wheels, paint decorations, and create personalized pieces while managing orders at their virtual kilns.

Turning the project into a management simulation was, Tu says, the team's earliest and perhaps most consequential decision.

They wanted players to understand not just how porcelain was made, but how an entire industrial civilization functioned: the technologies behind production, Jingdezhen's evolution over centuries, and the city's pivotal role in global trade.

The game's story stretches from the 11th through the 19th century. In one chapter, players learn how Sumali blue, an imported cobalt pigment that made blue-and-white porcelain famous, traveled from Persia to China. Later, they are tasked with producing a revolving vase, or zhuanxinping, intended as a diplomatic gift from the imperial court to Western envoys.

Even that storyline sparked debate within the development team.

"Could a revolving vase really have served as a State gift? Did that actually happen? Would it have been historically appropriate?" Tu recalls asking.

The team pursued the answer through historical archives, academic debates and library collections. A report from Macao suggested that the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) had presented such a vase to the King of Portugal, but some researchers questioned the evidence. Eventually, the developers located an original Qing-era gift register in Tsinghua University's library.

The game faithfully re-creates the landscape of Jingdezhen's heritage site. CHINA DAILY

"Only then," Tu says, "did we settle the argument."

That commitment to accuracy shaped the entire project. The team consulted more than 30 archaeological reports and historical studies, along with classical works including Tiangong Kaiwu (The Exploitation of the Works of Nature) and the Illustrated Treatise on Ceramic Manufacturing. Developers repeatedly traveled to Jingdezhen, mapping the city's digital geography according to the actual spatial relationships among archaeological sites.

Nearly every object in the game, from ceramic vessels and kiln tools to place names, includes historical explanations. Whenever players have questions, they can ask the AI master, a craftsman deliberately designed to look like an ordinary artisan rather than a larger-than-life hero.

"He needs to feel believable," says Zeng Zijiao, who leads Tencent Games' AI-powered digital human technology.

The virtual master remembers previous conversations, tracks players' progress, and adjusts his teaching style accordingly, responding differently to beginners than to experienced players.

Behind him sits an enormous knowledge base built specifically for the project. Tencent trained the AI on more than 30,000 academic papers, archaeological reports and scholarly books, along with over 5,000 ceramic specimens and information on nearly 1,000 representative porcelain objects from collections around the world.

The same database also powers several digital heritage projects developed during Jingdezhen's World Heritage campaign, including an AI conservation assistant, a ceramic "gene bank", and an interactive world map tracing the global journey of Chinese porcelain.

An AI-powered in-game master chats with players in real time, sharing fascinating insights into ceramics as they explore the game. CHINA DAILY

For Shu Zhan, head of Tencent's Digital Culture Lab, conventional digitization could never fully explain a heritage site as vast and complex as Jingdezhen.

Its history stretches across centuries. Its archaeological remains are scattered across the city. Its knowledge survives not only in artifacts and documents but also in the memories of veteran artisans.

Artificial intelligence, he says, offers a way to connect those fragments into an experience people can participate in rather than simply observe.

Zeng envisions something more ambitious. Rather than serving merely as a guide, he hopes the AI-powered master potter will build shared memories with players over time. In that way, it becomes more than an explainer. It turns people who have never visited Jingdezhen into participants in a living industrial heritage site.

Tu shares that vision.

If players spend hours moving through several centuries of ceramic history — making difficult decisions, mastering techniques, and eventually creating objects guided by Jingdezhen's own aesthetic principles — they leave with something more valuable than facts.

"They've seen it. They've lived through it. They've created something within it," he says. "That kind of identification isn't taught. It's experienced."

If players remember only one thing after putting down the game, Tu hopes it is this: Jingdezhen is not simply a place preserved from the Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1271-1368) dynasties. It is a living civilization that people can still experience, participate in, and help carry forward.

Contact the writer at baishuhao@chinadaily.com.cn