NANCHANG, Oct. 18 (Xinhua) -- The 2020 China Jingdezhen International Ceramic Fair opened Sunday in the city of Jingdezhen, a world-famous "porcelain capital" in east China's Jiangxi Province.

The fair has set up a total of 1,500 standard booths and is expected to see contracts worth over 20 billion yuan (about 3 billion U.S. dollars) signed, according to the organizers.

Due to the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic, international participants were not invited to this year's fair.

To better promote sales, the fair is being held both online and offline for the first time. Cooperating with e-commerce platform Tmall, the organizers have set up an 800-square-meter area for livestreamed promotions and sales shows.

With 1,700 years of ceramic-making history, Jingdezhen is home to more than 30,000 people working in the ceramics industry. The porcelain here is praised as being as "white as jade, bright as a mirror, thin as paper, and with the sound of a chime."

First held in 2004, the China Jingdezhen International Ceramic Fair has become a major platform to showcase the world's finest porcelain and drawn enterprises from many countries and regions, including Japan, Britain, Russia and Germany, in its previous 16 sessions.