Uncovering the chaos in Jianzhan kiln live broadcast rooms: Most of them are carefully planned scams, earning tens of millions a year

Starting from the live broadcast of the opening of Jianzhan kiln, this article deeply exposes the common methods of deceiving consumers in the live broadcast industry. It expresses concerns about the destruction of cultural heritage and calls on relevant industries to jointly control this issue. It is recommended for business owners and sales personnel to read.

"Wow! This is beautiful! This is the high-quality product that the friends in the live broadcast room have been waiting for for a long time!"

Following opening clams, gambling on stones, and opening blind boxes, "opening the Jianzhan kiln" as a new blind box content has attracted the attention of many netizens.

The live broadcast room of "Jianzhan Kiln Opening" usually only requires two people: one person holds the knife and is responsible for opening the kiln continuously; the other is responsible for explaining the "Jianzhan" that has been opened, guiding netizens to pay attention to and purchase it.

When a defective Jianzhan is found, the host will sigh and say, "It takes 2 days and 13 processes to make a set of Jianzhan. They are very precious." The defective products will either be discarded or sold cheaply to the audience in the live broadcast room as a benefit.

But when it comes to the finest products, the host's voice will become high-pitched, and he will keep exclaiming "wow" and praising, and then he will take out a flashlight or pour tea to allow netizens to further appreciate it.

At this time, the anchor's words became richer:

For example, if the car is decorated with a "golden lotus", the anchor will say: noble, grand, and shows the owner's status, "there is a lotus in the palm, and there is money to spend every day";

When the car turns to the "Imperial Green" color, the host randomly recites a poem: "Fine grape wine in the luminous cup, the pipa music urges me to drink."

Afterwards, the host will emphasize how difficult it is to make such high-quality, fine Jianzhan, "it takes tens of thousands of pieces of materials to fire a finished product", and will guide everyone to rush to buy it, "whoever pays first will get it", and once someone succeeds in buying it, he will continue to shout "Congratulations, big brother" in a high-pitched voice.

What is surprising is that the "fine Jianzhan" that these anchors talk about as extremely rare can usually be purchased at a relatively cheap price. Most of the prices are between 99 and 400 yuan, and some are even "originally priced at 1499 and now priced at 39."

There are indeed quite a few netizens who were infected by the atmosphere of the Jianzhan kiln opening live broadcast room and placed orders crazily.

On social platforms, many netizens shared the "good stuff" they received in the live broadcast room. Some bought more than a dozen in two days in the live broadcast room, and some already had hundreds of them at home. The prices ranged from tens to hundreds of yuan.

A netizen shared his experience of buying Jianzhan in a live broadcast room, saying that he watched the live broadcast for two days and finally spent 2,000 yuan to buy seven Jianzhan.

01 What is the charm of Jianzhan?

According to data, Jianzhan was first fired in the late Tang Dynasty and flourished in the Song Dynasty. It is a representative black porcelain and one of the eight famous porcelains of the Song Dynasty in China. It is famous for the "tea-making" culture of the Song Dynasty.

Unlike boiling tea or frying tea, brewing tea depends on the fineness and whiteness of the foam. Before the Song Dynasty, famous kilns in history all used bright colors or sky blue as the main tone. The color of the foam was not obvious, which affected the taste of the tea. However, the black porcelain of Jianzhan just fits the culture of "brewing tea".

Therefore, the color of Jianzhan is usually dark, and the patterns are limited to oil drops, rabbit hair, partridge, and Yaobian.

In addition, the firing process of Jianzhan is far more complicated than imagined. In order to fire the unique Jianzhan, the body clay must be made from the clay with a high iron content unique to Shuiji Town, Jianyang. The early production process alone has to go through a series of steps such as soil and ore selection, soil crushing, washing and filtering, aging, clay training and kneading, and finally glazing, kiln loading, firing and unloading.

Since the quality of Jianzhan is restricted by many factors such as the Jianzhan clay, Jianzhan glaze and temperature, Jianzhan has a low yield rate. Previously, some people believed that the best quality Jianzhan is only one in ten thousand, and the rate of fine products is less than 5%. In addition, the skills of each craftsman are different, and their yield rate and fine product rate are also different, but it is a fact that the general yield rate is not very high.

It is also worth mentioning that the current popularity of "Jianzhan" is inseparable from the promotion of the live broadcast sales model. Zhang Yingying's father, who was questioned for live broadcast sales, also mentioned in an interview that someone gave him "a box of Jianzhan to let him consider it."

02 The Jianzhan scam revealed

But unfortunately, most of these lively "Jianzhan kiln opening" live broadcasts are carefully planned scams.

The netizen mentioned above who spent 2,000 yuan to buy seven Jianzhan pieces was found by industry insiders to have only one piece of the real value which was a bit more expensive, while the others were between 10 yuan and 20 yuan.

This netizen stated that the reason for placing the order was that the live broadcast room deliberately exaggerated the reaction when the fine product was released, creating a sense of scarcity and high value of the Jianzhan teapot. For example, they would use similar rhetoric such as “If you sell a teapot worth thousands for 300 yuan, the master will scold you to death” and “It’s okay, I’ll take responsibility if there is any problem”. The other reason was that as a novice who didn’t know much about the business, he wanted to take advantage and find a bargain.

In fact, in order to create the realism of live kiln opening, some live broadcast rooms have taken great pains.

In the revelation of some live broadcast scams of kiln opening, some industry insiders said that this type of kiln opening live broadcast is generally fired in an electric kiln, and some defective teacups from wood kilns are added during the kiln opening process, with the purpose of showing that the yield of Jian teacups is low.

Some people directly put the teacups fired in electric kilns into saggers and load the kiln with it. In order to create a sense of reality, they apply a layer of low-temperature glaze and then heat it. This increases the viscosity between the saggers, and requires a lot of force to open them when the kiln is opened on site.

It should be noted that the firing process of Jianzhan can be divided into wood-fired firing and electric firing. Since the yield of wood-fired firing is low and is greatly restricted by temperature, with the advancement of modern technology, electric firing has gradually been developed, which uses a microcomputer controller to control the heating rod in the furnace to heat the iron base of Jianzhan. This firing process does not produce the calcination of fire and soil, and can control the oxidation and reduction atmospheres as well as the temperature.

Although the electric-fired Jianzhan has a high quality rate and the color is more uniform and delicate, it cannot replace the Song Dynasty style of the wood-fired one in form and spirit, the warm glaze color and rich layers. Generally speaking, the price of the wood-fired one is also more expensive.

But in the live broadcast room, people generally sit in front of the wood-fired kiln and open the kiln on the spot, creating the illusion that they have just been moved out of the wood-fired kiln.

"The quality of the open kiln is very common even in electric kilns, and it does not have much value." A person engaged in wood-fired Jianzhan said, "Fake open kiln or electric imitation wood is easier to identify after understanding, but now there are more and more 'real open kiln, fake wood-fired' (that is, electric kiln Jianzhan is placed in wood-fired kiln) that are difficult to distinguish."

Using electric kilns to replace wood-fired kilns is just one of the scams. What's even worse is using Dehua porcelain to replace Jianzhan.

The Bianniushi grabbed a defective product with free shipping for 1 yuan in the live broadcast room, but when searching the picture on other platforms, he found that it was not a Jianzhan.

In the previous article, we mentioned that Jianzhan is usually dark in color. In order to reduce losses, some Jianzhan sellers do sell defective products. However, the live broadcast room claims to sell dozens of fine Jianzhan products, and those with golden or silver colors are definitely not Jianzhan.

In addition, it stands to reason that each of these Jianzhans fired on site is unique. However, in the link that the anchor puts on the shared cart, it can be seen that it is marked as a "flash sale" or that one Jianzhan can sell multiple or even hundreds of them in just a few minutes.

What’s even more interesting is that by watching the live broadcasts of the kilns and the teapots, I found that although the kilns were different, the things produced in different live broadcasts were similar. For example, the “fine” chrysanthemum teapots were shown in multiple live broadcasts.

This chrysanthemum lamp is sold for 19.8 yuan in the live broadcast room; but when searching on other platforms, similar styles only cost 8.5 yuan each with a minimum order of 2, and there is room for discounts if the quantity is large.

After checking the origins of many similar styles, they all showed that they were from Dehua, not Jianyang District, Fujian Province, and the material was also ceramic.

In addition, there are some unscrupulous merchants who package the worst "chemical glaze" Jianzhan and sell it as original ore glaze. This type of Jianzhan will release toxic substances during use.

While searching for relevant information about Jianzhan, Bianyushi also discovered that live streaming of Jianzhan sales has even become a widely publicized sideline project, where the main focus is to buy Jianzhan for a few dollars and sell it for thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan.

The large number of defective products that were smashed in the live broadcast room only cost a few cents each, and the cost of smashing them for one night might be only 2,000 yuan, but the sales volume could reach between 10,000 and 50,000 yuan.

According to Sai Lei Hua Jin, those anchors with strong sales ability can earn tens of millions a year, while ordinary ones can easily earn two to three million yuan a year.

03 It’s not just consumers who are hurt

Thanks to short videos and live broadcasts, the Jianzhan firing process, which has a history of thousands of years, has become known to more and more people. At the same time, the industries and markets related to Jianzhan are also developing rapidly.

According to Jianyang News, currently, there are more than 7,000 registered Jianzhan enterprises and individuals in Jianyang District, with more than 30,000 employees. The output value of Jian Kiln Jianzhan is 5.08 billion yuan, and the brand value exceeds 16 billion yuan.

More and more young people are participating in it. Since 2020, nearly 2,000 live broadcast rooms of various sizes have emerged in Jianyang District, and Jianzhan e-commerce sales have shown explosive growth.

While Jianzhan e-commerce is developing rapidly, on the other hand, there are constant complaints about fake Jianzhan and kiln scams, and "fake Jianzhan" and "poisonous Jianzhan" have become hot topics of discussion.

"They are all trying to deceive laymen. In order to create a gimmick to sell goods, even the small tea cups are made 'stinky'," lamented a netizen on a social platform.

Some Jianzhan practitioners have also issued warnings: the live broadcast of Jianzhan kiln opening is a scam, the market is a bit chaotic, and everyone needs to be cautious when purchasing.

Obviously, the exaggerated "unboxing" not only hurts consumers and platforms, but also deeply affects the local cultural communication.

Similar scams are countless on major live streaming platforms.

For example, in the jade live broadcast scam that was exposed not long ago, a woman named Wang from Neijiang entered a live broadcast room selling jade and was defrauded of 220,000 yuan. The whole process was that the anchor set up a "guess the jade" link, and Ms. Wang guessed the name of the jade and obtained the right to buy the jade at a "discounted" price. She also transferred the money to the company's financial bank payment code provided by the "customer service" twice, but did not receive any response.

Similar tricks in this type of live broadcast rooms have also been further revealed: they first mix the fake with the real, inject chemical substances into some rough materials of poor quality to make the stones appear better under the light, and when the light is turned on, they all appear to be high ice or glass types, making jade lovers feel like they have picked up a big bargain every minute; the live broadcast rooms use "shills" to falsely report high prices, and the anchors try their best to bargain, pulling the price back and forth, inducing jade lovers to buy at prices they think are worth the money. The so-called bargaining is just a routine.

In addition, a "prize-winning guessing" session is set up to stimulate the participation of jade lovers. After winning the prize, jade lovers are again induced to buy jade that boasts of better water color and supply, so that jade lovers can fully experience the blessings brought by good luck, eliminate their defensive mentality, and firmly believe that the opportunity cannot be missed, thus speeding up the transfer of funds by jade lovers, and once the money is received, there will be no news immediately.

Whether it is Jianzhan or the jade industry, the emergence of more and more live broadcast scams is like a termite corroding the spread of traditional culture, and also harming real craftsmen and good products. To completely get rid of scams, it requires the joint efforts of consumers, platforms and the industry.

Author: Lin Xiaobai

Source: Bianews (ID: bianews8); accurate, fast and in-depth technology media