What does it mean for a country to be among the ones with the most World Heritage sites in the world?
Yang Han
For China, that question carried added weight on July 25, when the Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites became the country's 61st UNESCO site.
Held from July 19 to 29, the 48th session of the UNESCO panel added 25 new sites to the World Heritage List, including the first-ever inscriptions for three African countries — Comoros, Sao Tome and Principe, and South Sudan. The committee also granted emergency protection to three newly inscribed World Heritage sites and added three previously recognized sites to the danger list.
Among them, Jingdezhen stood out not only as China's sole nomination for 2026 but also as the first site explicitly themed around porcelain, and China's first-ever "industrial heritage" nomination.
