Left to right: Wang Yinxian, Jiang Rong, Huang Yuejun, Li Bifang, He Daohong, Gu Jingzhou, Wu Qunxiang, Shen Lianhua, Xu Xiutang, Li Changhong, Xu Handang The landscape has evolved to display a rich and varied array of styles, yet the methods of transmitting craftsmanship have remained largely unchanged. For example, during the Republican period, Wang Shengyi passed on his skills to Wu Yungen, Wang Baogen, and Zhu Kexin; Jiang Zuchen taught Pei Shimin; Jin Ashou instructed Wang Yinchun—all confined to the simple model of one master teaching one or a few disciples. It was not until the 1920s and 1930s, driven by the development needs of the pottery industry, that public learning platforms were established, giving rise to the embryonic form of a multi-master, multi-apprentice teaching model. Both the "Pottery Workers' Training Institute" established by the Liyong Company in 1921 and the "Jiangsu Province Yixing Elementary Pottery Vocational School" founded in 1933 experimented with group instruction methods involving multiple masters and multiple apprentices. Looking back at the documented history of Yixing pottery since the Ming and Qing dynasties, master craftsmen and renowned figures have emerged in every generation. However, before Gu Jingzhou in his later years, there had been no precedent for someone who could form their own distinctive characteristics, maintain them throughout their artistic life, and simultaneously influence a large group of people to inherit and carry forward these characteristics—truly achieving the stature of "founding a school." Why were the master craftsmen and famous artists of history unable to establish their own schools? There are many factors, but the most important is that traditional narrow and conservative attitudes limited their methods of transmitting skills. Their transmission structure was linear or fragmented, a structure extremely vulnerable to disruption or abrupt termination due to changes in the individual capabilities of successors and external factors. So then, why was Gu Jingzhou able to succeed?