Chaozhou

Over 1,650 enterprises in Chaozhou produce more than half of China's toilets. China makes over 70% of the world's toilets. Follow the arithmetic: a single mid-sized Chinese city controls roughly a third of global toilet production, with ceramic exports exceeding ¥11 billion ($1.5 billion) annually.

Chaozhou has been shaping clay since the Tang and Song dynasties, over 1,100 years ago. What changed is what gets made. The city's ceramic expertise evolved from porcelain art to household dishes to sanitary ware to smart toilets with integrated bidets, heated seats, and automated cleaning. Each step was adaptive radiation from a single ancestral competence: shaping, firing, and glazing clay. The biological parallel is structural — not metaphorical. Adaptive radiation occurs when one lineage diversifies into multiple ecological niches using the same core adaptation. Chaozhou's ceramic industry diversified into multiple market niches using the same core skill.

One mid-sized Chinese city holds roughly a third of global toilet production. The ancestral skill: 1,100 years of shaping, firing, and glazing clay.

The culture beneath the industry matters. Chaozhou is widely regarded as the origin of gongfu tea — the meticulous preparation method requiring specific clay teapots, precise water temperatures, and ritualised pouring sequences. In Chaoshan culture, gongfu tea functions as a social operating system: business deals, family disputes, and neighbourhood relations are mediated over tea. The clay expertise that produces the teapots is the same expertise that produces smart toilets. The craft is identical; the scale changed.

But Chaozhou's GDP tells a different story from its industrial dominance. At roughly ¥140 billion ($19 billion), it ranks 19th of Guangdong's 21 cities — a global ceramics capital generating less economic output than provincial peers with no comparable specialisation. Corruption scandals and car smuggling in the 1980s-90s led Beijing to deliberately slow the region's development, a political constraint that feeds back into underinvestment.

Termites build the most sophisticated clay structures in nature — mounds with ventilation, temperature regulation, and structural integrity surviving decades. The colony's building skill is collective, distributed, and refined over evolutionary time. Chaozhou's 1,650 ceramic firms operate identically: sharing clay knowledge, kiln techniques, and glaze chemistry accumulated over a millennium. Each firm is small. The collective output shapes a third of the global market.