Yixing teapot in China

THE FINE ART OF TEA

2009-03-23T05:41:00.002Z

Teapot making flourished in the late Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when people changed their manner of tea drink-ing using teapots, instead of individual cups.
The boccaro teapot was warmly welcomed by literary and refined scholars during that time and Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Some scholars even designed their own pots and worked with craftsmen together.
Yixing boccaro teapots have been well-known for centuries. The clay in Yixing appears dark red after baking be-cause of its iron content and various other chemical elements. With a perfect combination of artistic skills, the shaping, poems, calligraphy, paintings and seals, Yixing boccaro teapots embody strong character of oriental culture.

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Huge teapot in yixing

2009-03-23T05:41:00.001Z

A purple teapot, large enough to hold 750 kg of water, has been produced in yixing city in east china’s jiangsu province, the “beijing evening news” has reported. the 1.3-meter-high, 1.7-meter-long yixing teapot weighs 300 kg. the work on its face is in the form of paintings done by famous artists. wu tingsheng and wu guoqiang, famous father and son craftsmen, spent more than three months producing the teapot.

The history of yixing teapot

2009-03-23T05:39:00.001Z

There is only one way to make tea the creative skill lies in the pot. HUGH PEARMAN plots a 4,000-year history of ornament
Teapot design is a folk art in itself, with entire museums dedicated to it. But then there is a lot of ground to cover. All teapots derive from ancient Chinese tea vessels, and the best Chinese teapots have always been those from Yixing: red, brown or buff, usually unglazed. These have been around since a couple of centuries BC, but Europe only latched on to them in the 17th century, when trading with the Far East began.
Thousands of Yixing pots were shipped over to Holland and Britain in the first tea cargoes. There is evidence to suggest that they were piled into the ships as much for ballast as for export potential. Once spotted in Europe, however, they were instantly copied. After all, you have to make tea in something.
In Britain, tea was first offered to the public as a drink at Garraway’s coffee house in Change Alley, City of Lon-don, in 1657. It was first advertised as a wonder drink in newspapers in 1658, and finally found its way down the throat of that dabbler in all things fashionable, Samuel Pepys, in 1660. There was no looking back after that. By 1760 Britain was importing 4.5m tons of tea annually, so much that it threatened to ruin our balance of trade. We got round that by paying the Chinese with Indian-grown opium, which led to all kinds of trouble, but let’s not get into that here.
There’s a shock in store for those who believe that the Ur-teapot is the British ”Brown Betty”, the satisfyingly simple and cheap, round glazed teapot that has been made, in a range of sizes, since the mid-19th century. Those who revere this design must learn to live with the fact that it is a comparatively recent innovation. The history of teapots, because of the ceremonial nature of tea drinking, is a history of ornamentation. The ”novelty” teapot is as old as tea drinking itself.
The Chinese loved, and still do, making teapots in any number of bizarre shapes: looking like elephants, clumps of bamboo, fish, shells, birds, dragons, wrestlers, assorted fruits, anything at all rather than a basic shape (although there are occasional exceptions, such as a surprisingly modern, clean-cut rectangular pot made in Yixing in the early 1800s). So it comes as no surprise to find that, once Dutch and English and German potters started making their own pots to cash in on the tea-drinking craze, they, too, added perceived value to their products by embellishing them. The novelty pots of today, in the shape of JCB diggers, TV sets, saucy ladies or four-packs of lager, are absolutely in the traditional bloodline of the teapot. Tasteful modern designs are the aberration.
However, the Chinese never neglected the importance of flavour. Although they also produced dainty porcelain pots and cups (hence ”china” as a general description), that was for special occasions. For everyday use they favoured the Yixing ware, which was not only unglazed but meant to be unwashed. Tea deposits would build up over time, and fingermarks would turn the reddish pots nearly black round the top, but the tea would taste delicious. Some British tea aficionados still take the view that the pot is best left unwashed.
In fact, most of the tea-time habits we think of as quintessentially British are merely mild variants of Chinese or Japanese ones. Taking tea in the afternoon is one such import. Putting milk and sugar with it (despite beliefs to the con-trary) is another. The Chinese never put milk with their green tea, but liked a dash of hot milk with black tea, and were very happy with sugar.
The English potter John Dwight made the first copies of China ”redware” pots in Fulham in 1684. His techniques were copied by the Elers brothers from Holland, who set up a factory in Staffordshire. They, in turn, were copied by John Astbury, who pretended to be a simpleton and worked in the Elers factory for 18 months, learning the tricks of the trade. Astbury started producing fantastical glazed pots in the shapes of animals and houses. Josiah Wedgwood, recently set up in business, quickly latched on to the commercial potential of teapots made in the newly invented creamware, and the mass market had arrived. It took the invention of Spode bone china in 1800 to complete the Europeanisation of something the Chinese had been able to do for centuries.
Although coffee drinking arrived at about the same time as tea, coffeepots never attracted the same design atten-tion as teapots. Partly this was because making tea was such a simple thing: there is only one way to do it. In contrast, there are any number of ways of making coffee, and most of the effort went into improving the technology rather than the look of the object. Apart from burnished copper Lyons’ Corner Houses tea urns, there is no tea-drinker’s equivalent of the seductive machine ethos of espresso machines. Nor was there a coffee-lover’s equivalent of the Far Eastern tea ceremony to import. Tea was always more fashionable in Britain: family portraits of the time usually show them taking tea, while Continental equivalents are more likely to show the apparatus of coffee. The Dutch, however, who arguably discovered tea before the English, were even more wildly enthusiastic about it, to the extent that their characteristic canalside summer houses became known as tea houses.
The ”good design” buffs have long tried to tame the wild excesses of the teapot, with only limited success. Wedgwood’s neo-classical designs in black basaltware appealed to an early generation of taste-makers. The Victorian proto-modernist, Christopher Dresser, produced a startlingly contemporary cubist pot, and chaste silversmiths and ce-ramicists, through to today’s producers of modern classics such as Queensbury Hunt, have kept up a good supply of clean designs for modern-minded people. What sells in the auction rooms, however, is more likely to be a brash Clarice Cliff tea set from the 1930s art deco mixed with fauvism or souvenir pots from the heyday of the seaside resort.
Even more than these, the popularity of the ”English cottage” teapot never wanes. As Edward Bramah, the tea expert and museum-keeper, has remarked: ”There must have been enough of them potted over the years to build a city.” Square or rectangular pots are inherently unstable to pour because of the way the tea surges from side to side. House-shaped pots, however, have always been around. The Chinese had them, the first English potters did them, thousands are still made. Why? Nobody knows. Me, I’ve got two sizes of Brown Betty and that’s fine for me. A dash of milk and no sugar, please.

If You Want To Brew Tea, Use a Tea Bag

2009-03-23T05:37:00.000Z

THIS is the week to commune with contemporary teapots at museums in and around New York. A good number of these teapots were never intended to brew chamomile, but they are bound to cause constant comment among viewers. They have loose lids, these pots.
“What’s nice about some of the teapots here is that they deny their function,” Garth Clark, a ceramic historian, was saying as he strolled through an exhibition and sale of 250 teapots, cups and accessories, which runs through Sunday at the American Craft Museum at 40 West 53d Street in Manhattan.
The teapot, you see, has gone the way of that other major domestic icon, the chair. Just as architects have taken to designing chairs that encourage standing, so artisans are making teapots that do not hold water. In an age when the tea ceremony boils down to dropping a bag in a cup, does it matter?
Though its spout may seem vestigial, the modern teapot still triggers old-fashioned sentiments about home and mother. It does so even among people who never drink tea and whose mothers never made tea.
“Memories,” the folk singer Judy Collins murmured. She was at a benefit preview of the teapot show, gazing at a pot encrusted with bits of colored glass and crockery. It was made by her sister Holly Collins, a California ceramist.
“It evokes nostalgia for your grandmother’s day,” Judy Collins said.
“Not our grandmother’s,” Holly Collins said.
Across the gallery Mr. Clark, the show’s honorary chairman, was noting teapots that deny their function.
He paused before Kenneth Ferguson’s pot of black stoneware with a hare on its handle. “You’d have to be Attila the Hun to pick it up,” he said with a small smile. As for Douglas Peck’s sleeping-dog-in-a-garden teapot of terra cotta, he warned, “The handle’s twisted the wrong way and watch out for the thorns.”
At the Newark Museum, the decorative arts curator, Ulysses Dietz, was preparing “Strong Tea: Richard Notkin and the Yixing Tradition,” to open Saturday and run through Sept. 1.
The show, organized by the Seattle Art Museum, includes 25 pots by Mr. Notkin, an Oregon artist whose work combines the craftsmanship of the ancient potters of Yixing, China, with contemporary social and political issues. Teapots in the shapes of human hearts, light bulbs, skulls and nuclear reactors are featured with photographs of the Yixing prototypes.
There is also an exhibition of 100 tea and coffeepots from the Newark Museum’s permanent collection. Mr. Dietz said the tea in these pots is not weak either.
“You’ll find some pretty wild stuff in the 18th century,” he said. “Pots that are useful but extremely sculptural: hens, parrots, squirrels. And weird stuff: a Chinese pot made for the Dutch market, painted black, with pictures of turbaned Nubians playing trumpets.”
Except for George Ohr, a maverick potter whose crumpled and twisted “clay babies” rattled teacups in the early 1900’s, teapots were largely functional until about 1980. Then Peter Shire came along and the pot went architectonic. Mr. Shire’s work is not represented at any major show around town right now, but there is a new book about him, “Tempest in a Teapot: The Ceramic Art of Peter Shire” (Rizzoli , $27.50).
A California sculptor and furniture designer, Mr. Shire makes pots that reflect his association with the Memphis group in Italy. He considers the teapot one of the most complex and difficult exercises in clay: “The Holy Grail of pot-tery.”
To the bodies of his pots Mr. Shire attaches outlandish appendages, whirls of beams and tubes; the Los Angeles Freeway is a muse. He says his pots will pour, but because they are confrontational, “you’d have a hard time grabbing them.”
Nor could you get a handle on the 200 pots at the American Craft Museum, as they were set on pedestals and boxes. But 40 of the potters were accessible enough at the benefit. They were the ones wearing teapot pins and holding wineglasses.
While most of the artists headed for the bar, tea was being served, as it is every day during the show and sale. Pric-es for pots range from $60 to $5,200.
The red dot under Mr. Peck’s sleeping-dog yixing teapot ($300) indicated a sale as did the smile on his face.
“I have to move on from teapots to something else, ” said Mr. Peck, a 33-year-old artist from Rhode Island, “but teapots are on a roll right now. So I don’t know.”
The ceramics magazines are filled with announcements for teapot shows. “There were five big shows focusing on zisha teapots this year,” he said. “What was the thing before that? Pitchers maybe. Next year we may be standing here talking about salt and pepper shakers.”

chinese yixing zisha teapot-dezhong pot

2009-03-19T13:35:00.005Z

length: 14cm;
width: 9.5cm;
height 7.5cm;
volume: 200ml

This Yixing Teapot is named “dezhong teapot”. The raw material is purple clay ore in HuangLong Mounton in Yixing CITY OF Jiang Su province. Its’s designer ChengJian Ming was the apprentice of ShouZhen Zi Sha teapot, he made it by hand by himself.

This teapot is the middle one in the Zi Sha teapot, It has higher usable and collectable value. Cylindrical Teapot, Straight neck and spout, curved square handle.

By virtue of consummate art of making teapot, he got the NO 1 in "Panama International Fair" and got excellence Award in "Chicago Expo" in 1932. ChengJian Ming is the grandson of master ChengShouZhen, who inherit family technology and made " ShouZhen ball teapot" by hand . " ShouZhen ball teapot" is one of the best popular teapot. This teapot not only inherit predecessor's technology,but also integrate of his own artistic style.

The entire teapot is simple and elegant This teapot is on behalf of traditional Chinese culture and tea culture, which is oftern sent to international friends as a gift. The Master ChenJianMing’s works gradually spread to overseas and have a good reputation. We attached the collection certificates by the authority department, which have a very high artistic value and collection value, which is favored by many collectors of ceramic products.

Related links in Yixing pots in here.

chinese yixing zisha teapot-dipper

2009-03-19T13:28:00.002Z

length: 16.5cm;

width: 12cm;
height 8cm;
volume: 400ml;

This Teapot is named “dipper teapot”. The raw material is purple clay ore in HuangLong Mounton in Yixing CITY OF Jiang Su province. Its’s designer ChengJian Ming was the apprentice of ShouZhen Zi Sha teapot, he made it by hand by himself.

This teapot is the big one in the Zi Sha teapot, It has higher usable and collectable value. One of the traditional and classical style. Simple molding The handle is comfortable. Straight spout Deeply loved by collector

By virtue of consummate art of making teapot, he got the NO 1 in "Panama International Fair" and got excellence Award in "Chicago Expo" in 1932. ChengJian Ming is the grandson of master ChengShouZhen, who inherit family technology and made " ShouZhen ball teapot" by hand . " ShouZhen ball teapot" is one of the best popular teapot. This teapot not only inherit predecessor's technology,but also integrate of his own artistic style.

This teapot is on behalf of traditional Chinese culture and tea culture, which is oftern sent to international friends as a gift. The Master ChenJianMing’s works gradually spread to overseas and have a good reputation. We attached the collection certificates by the authority department, which have a very high artistic value and collection value, which is favored by many collectors of ceramic products.

You can learn more about Yixing teapots in our website.

chinese yixing zisha teapot-Dipper pot

2009-03-19T13:23:00.001Z

length: 16.5cm;
width: 12cm;
height 8cm;
volume: 400ml

This Teapot is named “ Dipper teapot”. The raw material is purple clay ore in HuangLong Mounton in Yixing CITY OF Jiang Su province. Its’s designer ChengJian Ming was the apprentice of ShouZhen Zi Sha teapot, he made it by hand by himself.

One of the traditional and classical style.
Simple molding
The handle is comfortable.
Straight spout
Deeply loved by collector

By virtue of consummate art of making teapot, he got the NO 1 in "Panama International Fair" and got excellence Award in "Chicago Expo" in 1932. ChengJian Ming is the grandson of master ChengShouZhen, who inherit family technology and made " ShouZhen ball teapot" by hand . " ShouZhen ball teapot" is one of the best popular teapot. This yixing teapot not only inherit predecessor's technology,but also integrate of his own artistic style.

This teapot is on behalf of traditional Chinese culture and tea culture, which is oftern sent to international friends as a gift. The Master ChenJianMing’s works gradually spread to overseas and have a good reputation. We attached the collection certificates by the authority department, which have a very high artistic value and collection value, which is favored by many collectors of ceramic products.

MORE about yixing teapots in here.

Yixing zisha teapot-Fish of lung

2009-03-18T08:14:00.004Z

length: 17cm;
width: 10.5cm;
height 9cm;
volume: 320ml

This Teapot is named “Fish of lung teapot”. The raw material is purple clay ore in HuangLong Mounton in Yixing CITY OF Jiang Su province. Its’s designer ChengJian Ming was the apprentice of ShouZhen Zi Sha teapot, he made it by hand by himself.

MORE DETAILS IN YIXING TEAPOTS.

This teapot is the large one in the Zi Sha teapot, It has higher usable and collectable value. Fish and Dragon are traditional auspicious objects. They are sculpted on both side of pot. The dragon head is on the teapot lid, with long tongue. It seems a vivid picture of clouds and waves surging.

By virtue of consummate art of making teapot, he got the NO 1 in "Panama International Fair" and got excellence Award in "Chicago Expo" in 1932. ChengJian Ming is the grandson of master ChengShouZhen, who inherit family technology and made " ShouZhen ball teapot" by hand . " ShouZhen ball teapot" is one of the best popular teapot. This teapot not only inherit predecessor's technology,but also integrate of his own artistic style.

This teapot is on behalf of traditional Chinese culture and tea culture, which is often sent to international friends as a gift. The Master ChenJianMing’s works gradually spread to overseas and have a good reputation. We attached the collection certificates by the authority department, which have a very high artistic value and collection value, which is favored by many collectors of ceramic products.

Introduction to yixing zisha teapot-Philoxeroides

2009-03-18T07:54:00.002Z

length: 17.5cm;
width: 11.5cm;
height 10cm;
volume: 480ml

This Teapot is named “Philoxeroides teapot”. The raw material is purple clay ore in HuangLong Mounton in Yixing CITY OF Jiang Su province. Its’s designer ChengJian Ming was the apprentice of ShouZhen Zi Sha teapot, he made it by hand by himself.

The pot is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. The lid and button are flat and round.
The spout and handle are smooth.
The whole pot is simple but imposing.
This pot was permanently collected in Wuxi Museum.

More details in here: Yixing teapots in China

Introduction to yixing zisha teapot-drop ball

2009-03-18T07:48:00.001Z

ength: 16cm;
width: 10cm;
height 12cm;
volume: 430ml

This Teapot is named “ShouZhen Drop Ball teapot”. The raw material is purple clay ore in HuangLong Mounton in Yixing CITY OF Jiang Su province. Its’s designer ChengJian Ming was the apprentice of ShouZhen Zi Sha teapot, he made it by hand by himself.
This teapot is the large one in the Zi Sha teapot, It has higher usable and collectable value. Why was it called “Duo Ball teapot”? Because it is consisted of there ball piled with each other. It has a round body, straight neck , semicircle top, natural curly mouth, and long and smooth hand. This teapot looks like antique , polished, and has beautiful line.
“ShouZhen Drop Ball teapot ” is one of the representative of Master Shou-zhen, which was awarded the NO.1 in “Panama international Fair ” in 1915. And in 1932, it was awarded Excellence in “Chicago Expo”. ChengJian Ming is the grandson of Master Shou-zhen, who inherited family technical secrets. “Shouzhen Drop Ball” which was made by him is exquisite and He is the only one who got prize in the Duo Ball technology. This teapot is not only inherited his predecessor’s art , but integrated his own artistic style. By virtue of this pot, The designer of this teapot ChengJianMing had got the gold medal prixe in the” first Shantou Tea Culture Expo”.
This teapot is on behalf of traditional Chinese culture and tea culture, which is oftern sent to international friends as a gift. The Master ChenJianMing’s works gradually spread to overseas and have a good reputation. We attached the collection certificates by the authority department, which have a very high artistic value and collection value, which is favored by many collectors of ceramic products.

You can learn more about this yixing teapots.

The art of brewing that cuppa

2009-03-18T07:45:00.001Z

Drinking Chinese tea is an elaborate affair, which involves everything from choosing the right pot to pouring the tea out the right way, an expert from China tells GUAN LIBING.
DRINKING tea is not just a matter of gulping it down.
Mr Zhu Changde, a tea expert from Jiangsu province, China, has a whole set of rules governing the brewing and serving of Chinese tea -and even the choice of teapots.
The 45-year-old is now in Singapore to demonstrate his skills at the Takashimaya SC Shopping Centre in Ngee Ann City. His twice-daily Chinese tea-brewing demonstrations end today.
While here, Mr Zhu aims to give people a better understanding of the famous Zisha teapots, which are handcrafted and produced in Jiangsu.
So before you go into the kitchen to make a cuppa, here are some tips:
- In the brewing of Chinese tea, the most important factor is the choice of teapot and tea leaves. Next comes the use of tea cups, says Mr Zhu.
The self-trained expert in the art of brewing Chinese tea says the Chinese from northern China prefer to use big teapots and cups, while the southerners go for small pots and cups.
- Explains Mr Zhu in fluent Mandarin: “There is a golden rule in brewing Chinese tea — never mix the teapots when using different tea leaves. This means that there is no such a thing as a common teapot, because it will mar the flavour of the tea.
- “When you brew tea like Wulong or Baolei, you should use boiling water about 100 deg C and this should be poured into the pot from a higher level, so as to flush out any particles from the tea leaves.”
- Another golden rule is that the first round of tea made is never consumed.
Says Mr Zhu: “This is used to pour over the teapot and cups for a better shine.
“The second round of tea should stay in the pot for at least 30 seconds before serving. This is to give the tea leaves some time to release their flavour. For each subsequent round, the timing should be increased.”
However, he warns that for a better cuppa, the tea leaves should not be used for more than five brews. Otherwise, they will loose their flavour.
It is also important to remember that in each round, all the tea down to the last drop must be poured out before brewing a new pot.
Mr Zhu has another set of rules for serving tea:
- The tea should be poured from a lower angle into each cup, to avoid spilling, “particularly for the more expensive tea”, he says.
- Each brew should be divided equally among the number of cups. He says that such skills have to be acquired through much practice.
He adds: “Certain parts of China have their own customs when serving tea. In the Swatow area, for example, the tea has to be divided equally, down to the last drop. But in Taiwan, there is an extra cup, which serves as the reserve.
“The tea novice should remember that all the cups and teapots should be rinsed in hot water and preferably be kept warm before being used. This helps to give the tea a fuller body,” says Mr Zhu.
Zhu Changde’s tea-brewing demonstration is on at Basement 2 of Takashimaya SC Shopping Centre today at 12.30 2 pm and 6 8 pm.
POT SHOTS
MR ZHU CHANGDE, married with an 11-year-old daughter, runs a business dealing in Zisha teapots.
Born in Jiangsu province, he was first exposed to the art of brewing Chinese tea as a child, through sessions with a granduncle.
To date, he has given numerous tea-brewing demonstrations in Hongkong.
But he laments that the people living in Yixing, his hometown, do not pay much attention to brewing tea.
“Despite living in Yixing, which is the main producer of Zisha teapots, many of the people make tea from plastic teapots. That is the irony!”

ZishaTeapot.co.uk is a leading online retailer of quality Zisha Teapots and tea accessories. We were established in 2006 in the city of Yixing China. The people at ZishaTeapot.co.uk are dedicated to providing our customers with a complete China Teapots experience. Along with our fine selections of Chinese Zisha Teapots, we also offer elegant tea sets and beautiful teacups. Not only will we offer a wonderful selection at a great value, but we also strive to educate on the many health benefits of tea and Chinese tea culture.

Life in zisha pot

2009-03-18T07:40:00.000Z

Xu Xiutang sits at the head of a long table taking the center of an arbor. Behind him is a large leather handbag with a protruding strap. The only thing that looks out of place is the mouth sticking out of the other end. Of course you won’t feel strange if you know it is actually a teapot in the shape of a handbag - made of pottery no less.
Xu did not make the pot, which is functional if you want. One of his apprentices did. As a 70-year-old grand master of Yixing zisha pottery, Xu does not need extra attention - he has plenty. Dozens of his sculptures are built into a downtown park, portraying local life as it was when he was a boy.
Xu started as an apprentice in the 1950s. But unlike most craftsmen who were intent on making good teapots, Xu couldn’t help molding the zisha clay into figurines, some of which could also be used as teapots. His talent for sculpture was discovered and he was sent to work on a public project.
That stint opened a new vista for him. “You can make products or you can make works of art,” he says. He nimbly straddles both worlds, but obviously he is inclined towards the latter.
Like the clay he uses, Xu’s work is nourished by local tradition and folk culture. But he is open to new influences. Sometimes he hosts artists from Western countries who stay in his 2-hectare compound and make whatever they desire with zisha. His apprentices are also encouraged to develop their own styles.
Xu’s home is a shrine to all things associated with folk customs, especially those no longer in use.
Giant grinding stones form a circular wall lining up the driveway. Big vats and farm tools such as wooden wind machines are neatly stored in a hanger-like warehouse - testament to a bygone era. A pond with lotuses, an arbor and a wooden boat add a touch of rustic allure.
Only in the building that houses his bedroom does he display some of his own work, with the second floor serving as a formal exhibition room.
One look around his compound and you’ll know where his inspiration comes from - life as it is depicted in folktales, life as idyllic as a rice paddy, and life that is more or less preserved in this part of a southern town.

Zisha pottery in Yixing

2009-03-18T07:36:00.001Z

Thousands of years, the unique qualities of the extensive zisha, a clay deposit found only around Yixing, a small town in East China’s Jiangsu Province about 170 kilometres west of Shanghai, have supported a thriving pottery art and industry.
Classified as purple clay, using different formulas and firing temperatures, zisha turns into several different colour variations such as black, brown, red, yellow and green. Though not as pale or fine as kaolin, it needs no glazing. And after firing, the product is solid and impermeable, yet porous enough to breathe.
The art of zisha pottery in Yixing originated during the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD). The range of traditional pottery produced from the clay base includes teapots, tea sets, stationary sets and flowerpots.
The teapot, which usually comes in round and square version, is the most famous of the works. The round teapots are made in the shape of balls, a belly, drum and piece of garlic, while the square works are tapered or molded into a polygon, rhombus or trapezoid.
Generally marked by their simplicity and exquisite craftsmanship, the teapots are also appreciated for their practi-cality. A Yixing pot enhances a brew of tea by bringing out its colour, smell and taste. The pot’s body seems to absorb the tea and trap its fragrance.
The quality finish of the tea and its flavour can be attributed to the porous nature of the clay ?consisting mainly of quartz, kaolin, mica and a high volume of iron oxide.
Yixing teapots were introduced to Europe in the late 17th century, providing models for the earliest Dutch, German and English teapots.
Since then the Yixing zisha teapots have grown in popularity throughout China and Europe, and are highly prized because of their design, craftsmanship and unique purple clay.
Pictures of birds and fish, flowers, animals and Chinese characters can all be found on the pieces, which are marked with a traditional seal, helping to turn the practical utensils into works of art with national features.
After 1949, the Chinese Government established communes in an effort to gather master potters who would in turn recruit and train a new generation to insure the preservation of traditional skills.
By 1979 the two Yixing purple sand factories were employing more than 1,000 workers to produce the teapots by using traditional methods, but private workshop still dominated.
Even today, as in centuries past, most artisans making Yixing teapots serve a long apprenticeship under established masters, receiving rigorous training in all aspects of the craft.
The reopening of China in the late 1970 and early 1980s initiated a rediscovery of Yixing teapots by local art col-lectors and tea connoisseurs outside the country.
With enthusiastic infusion, the artistic potential of the new generation of Yixing potters began to blossom. Young artisans created more contemporary styles and followed modern geometric principles.
Some works equaled and even surpassed the efforts of the great master potters of the Qing Dynasty.
This outpouring of innovation and artistry has continued with enthusiastic knowledgeable collectors eagerly await-ing each year’s abundant harvest of new designs and re-creations of the old ones.

Yixing is synonymous with zisha teapots

2009-03-18T07:35:00.000Z

Ah, the charm of a small city! There are many cities this size in China, but many are nondescript and do not possess distinctive features. Yixing, in East China’s Jiangsu Province, suffers from the opposite headache: It has so many resources it can use to promote tourism and it is sometimes at a loss what to highlight.
For most Chinese, Yixing is synonymous with zisha teapots, the dark brown, unglazed and small-sized ware pop-ular among tea aficionados. “Zisha” literally means “purple clay“, which is the raw material for the namesake pottery and is available only in the Yixing vicinity.
You don’t have to like tea to enjoy Yixing, though, and you don’t have to splurge thousands of yuan on a pot to pour tea from. As a matter of fact, zisha teapots have evolved from mainly functional to predominantly decorative or even artistic, and the really unique ones have become collector’s items and indeed are pricey.
A walk down the main street in Dingshu, a small town in the southern suburb of Yixing, is like a journey into a zi-sha pottery paradise. There are 1,000-plus workshops in this “capital of pottery”, employing some 30,000 people. Here, pottery-making goes back 7,000 years and the current kind of zisha ware first appeared in the Song Dynasty (960-1279).
It is all made possible by the special zisha clay endowed by Mother Nature. “You can imitate our craftsmanship, but you cannot reproduce the clay,” says one zisha maker. The preparation of the clay and the sculpting has remained the same throughout centuries, but there is only one kiln still in working condition.
Called “dragon kiln”, it goes up a slope, with evenly placed holes on both sides of a hump, that resemble the scales of a dragon. However, kilns require special firewood and can be polluting. They have been replaced by electric stoves, which make it easier to control the temperature and yield better-quality ware, and lessen the burden on labor and the environment.
Teapots go with tea, and Yixing tea is a hidden secret. It is around here that Lu Yu (AD 733-804) of the Tang Dy-nasty (AD 618-907) wrote his Tea Bible. Yet, a statue of Lu stands forlornly by the roadside, in front of a vast rolling meadow of tea shrubbery.
“Though accounting for 40 percent of tea production in Jiangsu Province, Yixing tea does not figure prominently in the local economy,” says a guide.
Even when you totally ignore the tea and teapot, Yixing is a wonderful weekend getaway for busy city slickers. It is situated on the northwest side of Taihu Lake, roughly at the center of a radius that links Nanjing, Wuxi, Suzhou, of Jiangsu Province, Shanghai, and Hangzhou of Zhejiang Province, one of the economic hotspots in the nation.
According to the Chinese, water adds sparkle to a place. In addition to being upstream of the famous lake, Yixing has three expanses of water so unique that a special word was coined to describe it. “Jiu” refers to something smaller than a lake but larger than a river.
A 4.5-sq-km jiu has been turned into the diamond of a downtown park. Residents stroll around the meticulously landscaped gardens, exquisite pavilions and across a dozen singularly shaped bridges. And at night buildings along the lake are tastefully lit, exuding an aura of fairyland.
This is not the only mammoth urban park. The other two lagoons are also being developed. The 5.5-sq-km Dragon Ridge Forest Park offers a perfect combination of natural habitat, multiple museums and a playground, with a newly rebuilt 108m pagoda to boot.
As the old saying goes, kind people prefer mountains and wise ones adore water. Yixing has both. Its mountains are covered with bamboo forests and conceal caves of rock formations. Shanjuan, the best known of the 80-something caves, has cavernous halls which look like a giant movie set.
It is rare for a place of 2,000 sq km and 1 million people, including suburbs, to have so much delight for both resi-dents and visitors. The capital of pottery, the town on waterways, home to southern elegance, the birthplace of thou-sands of the nation’s top educators Above all, it offers poetic tranquility tucked away, yet so close to the boisterous boomtowns of the Yangtze River Delta.

Zisha teapots artist

2009-03-18T07:27:00.002Z

Chengshouzhen is one of the most famous artists of Sand-fired technology during the Republic of China. He was born in 1865, his name is Bingxindaoren,and his hometown was located at Chuanbushangan village,Yixing city( which is also called Zisha village now). He learned from his Adoptive father called Shaoyouting who was also a famous Expert specialized in Zisha technology at that time when he was young. An excellent teacher will have famous apprentice. Depending on Chengshouzhen’s talent and his hard work , he does better than his adoptive, and become famous soon. Therefore successively employed in the "Yixing Yangyi Ceramic Company", "Yixing Liyong Ceramic Company", and "Jiangsu Province, Yixing pottery industry in the county vocational school office technician."

In the year 1910, in the first QuanYe meeting which was hold in NanYang town of NanJing city, ChengShouZhen of “Yixing Yangyi Ceramic Company” got the prize for ZiSha pot. On behalf of "Yixing Liyong Ceramic Company", ChengShouZhen participated in the international meeting in Panama and got the NO.1 in 1915. He was the first Zi Sha artist who got the international prize in the world. ChengShouZhen’s Zi Sha port was awarded the gloden prize in Chicago Expo in 1932.
ChengShouZhen was famous due to many times’ Award-winning in Europe and the United States International Fair. In the winter in 1934, Japanese businessmen who heard ChengShouZhen came to buy ChengShouZhen’s teapot. When he saw the process of chengShouzhen making teapot, he repeatedly applauded and took a photo for him. In the photo, chengshouzhen worn hemicycle hat , chinese traditional wadded jacket, and a pair of glass, Concentrated on making an Archaize teapot.

In 1935, the magistrate of YiXing city gave the London Games certificates to ChengShouZhen by himself, at the same time he praised him for getting honor for China.

ChengShouZhen is one hard-working and prolific masters of ZiSha pot,who was inherited from his nursing father and good at making physical concise system of pot-type. Medium rough works have charm, skilled artistry. The “ Duo Ball teapot” is the most famous one, which contain three ball named large, medium and small ball overlaped together, then name “Duo Ball teapot”. Its shape mainly constitutes of beautiful arc with smoothly line, comfortable visual sense, which put the whole pot stand balancly and great nice.

You can learn more about his works in yixing zisha teapot online shop.

Old army HQ gives teapots a new home

2009-03-17T07:46:00.000Z

One of a handful of old buildings to have survived development in the Central district of Hong Kong Island is Flagstaff House, formerly the office and residence of the Commander of British Forces. Built between 1844 and 1846, shortly after China had ceded Hong Kong to Britain, this classical, two-storey building has found a new lease of life as a museum of tea ware.
Most of the exhibits have been donated by Dr Lo Kwee Seong, a Hong Kong businessman who began collecting Yixing teapots in the early 1950s. Yixing is in Jiangsu province on the Yangtze basin and its potters are famous for their colour clay wares, of which the purple clay type or zisha are the most popular.
The area is also noted for its tea. At the time of the 8th century Tang Emperor Su it produced one of the very few kinds of ‘tributary’ tea presented to the court for Imperial consumption.
In a foreword to the catalogue of the Flagstaff House collection, Dr Lo recalls walking along Queen’s Road in Central in the early 1950s and noticing a large number of second-hand teapots on display. ‘I was so carried away that I bought over 30 of them on impulse’, he writes.
Some of his prize finds in the early days were copies of Yixing teapots made in Europe in the late 17th and early 18th century.
After two decades Dr Lo had more than 200 teapots, mainly Qing dynasty but with one of two Ming pieces. In 1978 a major collection of Yixing wares was auctioned in Hong Kong and he snapped up nearly all of them. He then broadened his scope, first to include all teapots made in China and, secondly, any vessel with a spout and handle.
Pieces in the museum date from the Six Dynasties (265-587 AD) tot he 20th century and the outstanding feature of the collection is the Yixing ware. The museum is open every day except Wednesday from 10 am to 5 pm. Entry is free.

OLD CLAY INTO NEW SHAPE

2009-03-17T07:45:00.000Z

Three craftsmen from Yixing, East China’s Jiangsu Province, known as the hometown of zisha, brought their latest works ,yixing teapots,to the China Souvenir Fair, held last week in Beijing, in the hope of sharing their artistry and love for the art. Different from the traditional zisha works, which are primarily teapots since the unique properties make it ideal for brewing tea, the three demonstrate their new understanding of this art form. In Wu Shunhua’s eyes, zisha is the cream of clay just as jade is the cream of stone and sandalwood the cream of timber.
Wu, 51, is among the few who make zisha vases instead of teapots, but he has also created stationary sets and wall-hangings.
What makes Wu’s work more unique is that he engraves his traditional Chinese paintings and calligraphy on the pottery.
Born into a farmer’s family in Yixing, Wu has been extremely fond of traditional Chinese paintings and calligraphy since childhood. He has studied under several famous Shanghai artists and also studied painting in art academies in Beijing. Wu showed an interest in sculpture and modelling, but it was not until 1985 that he found zisha pottery was the best way to blend all his interests and skills.
“Zisha is not only a kind of clay for teapots, but a Chinese culture involving a variety of arts including painting, calligraphy, sculpture and seal cutting,” Wu said.
Now he paints on the surface of the pottery, creating mountains, waters, flowers, birds and ancient figures with en-gravers instead of a brush.
His designs are rich in antique flavour and beauty, usually coming from folklore, historical stories and Chinese li-terary works. After painting for more than 30 years and poring over a large number of works, he can understand every figure or scene and engraves like an inspired man.
Besides his own paintings, Wu also copies works of well-known artists.
For instance, one of his square vases features contemporary artist Li Keran’s painting of a buffalo boy sitting on the back of an ox while looking at the mountains and waterfalls from a distance.
The rubbings of stone carvings kept at the famous Dunhuang Grottoes, in Northwest China’s Gansu Province, is another source of inspiration.

Rare ceramics with a historical twist

2009-03-12T02:30:00.002Z

Imagine a world full of dainty objets d'art where British good manners conceal passions kept at boiling point by a steady trickle of discoveries, and you have the International Ceramics Fair in a nutshell. The show, which opened Thursday at the Park Lane Hotel on Piccadilly and closes Sunday night, has the feel of a club for adolescent grown-ups trying hard to control their eagerness as they peer at scintillating porcelain and faience vessels from England, France and Germany.
One reason for their excitement is the growing rarity of the objects. When the organizers Anna and Brian Haughton held their first fair in 1982, 38 dealers took part. This year, there are only 12 participants, partly because quality stan-dards have been raised to the highest level, which now requires a substantial outlay, but partly too because the goods are getting scarcer all the time. As they vanish, so do some dealers. When Anna Haughton reviewed past fairs four years ago, she found that 47 specialists had retired or died since 1982. In the auction arena, the number of sales has precipitously declined.
Indeed, the contraction of supplies is the reason that made a ceramics fair conceivable in the first place in the days of abundance, the incentive to travel to look for gems would not have been strong enough. Today, the Ceramics Fair appears to its fans as a unique if ephemeral treasure house where they can go hunting.
It holds another attraction. From the beginning, the Haughtons felt that this highly focused fair required a parallel program of lectures dealing with discoveries in the field. The fair has now become the venue for an international ce-ramics convention that academics and museum curators make a point of attending. This is typical of a field in which some dealers are themselves scholars in this trade as in Old Master drawings, advanced knowledge is a condition for survival.
As I walked around the fair while it was being installed, I was struck by the widespread concern for learning and the remarkable degree of precision often attained.
Jonathan Horne, who specializes in English pottery of the 17th and 18th century, is so taken by the subject that he opened his own publishing outfit. Jonathan Horne Publications lists titles such as "British Delft at Williamsburg," in which the author, John Austin, systematically compares English delftware with archaeological finds in the former co-lonial capital.
Horne, who is the president of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology, says that archaeology has transformed our understanding of 18th-century pottery. As an example, he cites David Barker's book (published by Horne), "William Greatbatch," which has revolutionized the history of Staffordshire pottery. A potter's tip was discovered at Fenton, in Stoke-on-Trent. For the first time, the full range of wares produced in a single 18th-century factory was revealed. Many of the wares represented by the shards recovered were previously attributed to other manufactures.
Asked about a teapot of mellow brown ware with a Chinese look, Horne answers without hesitation "London, circa 1760." The type is rare because, as Horne says, "they tend to crack when hot water is poured in." British bumbling and fumbling, it seems, has early antecedents.
What Horne does not mention is that the pot imitates in style and color the Chinese type of ware called Yixing. The first Yixing teapots arrived in England in 1669 together with the first shipment of tea, as Edith Frankel noted in the outstanding catalogue of her New York exhibition "Zisha; The Purple Sand of China" earlier this year. The Chinese merchants insisted on dispatching them because of their superior heat-preserving qualities, an essential requirement for tea to brew properly.
The English, being English, found Yixing too expensive. Two Dutch brothers, John and David Elers, silversmiths by training, arrived from Holland and started producing imitations in 1690. By 1700, they stopped production, embroiled in legal battles over patents. Others took up the imitation job but produced the easily cracked teapots, now sought for their rarity.
Next to Horne's stand, John Whitehead is equally passionate about history with a different twist. His latest discov-ery is a tray from a tea service given by Napoleon to Queen Hortense, the consort of his brother Louis Bonaparte. It can be precisely dated thanks to the archives at the manufactory at Sevres. Commissioned in 1812, it was given by Napoleon as a New Year present. Hortense, who no longer shared her life with Louis, was having an affair with the Comte de Flahaut. She had just given birth to their illegitimate son, later known as the duc de Morny.
Scenes reserved in grisaille on the gold ground of the oval tray illustrate fables by the 17th-century writer Jean de La Fontaine familiar to every French schoolboy. One scene is "La veuve d'une journee" (The One-Day Widow), another "La veuve d'un an" (The One-Year Widow) and the third one, in a rectangular panel, "Le meunier, son fils et l'ane" (The Miller, his Son and the Donkey), a tale ending with an epitaph that effectively advises "Do as you please." Whitehead suspects that the tray offers a rare example of half-moralizing irony aimed by Napoleon at his sister-in-law.
"The One-Day Widow," depicted with a bitter face, reads as an allusion to Hortense's disappointment in her spouse, which she swiftly overcame. "The One-Year Widow" is a commentary on her long liaison with Flahaut, while the central panel conveys Napoleon's message "Who cares anyway?"
History takes a transatlantic twist with the Haughtons' pieces. A pair of Chelsea serving dishes with flowers painted in imitation of German porcelain from Meissen can be dated between 1752 and 1758 thanks to its red anchor mark. On one dish two naturalistic butterflies oddly contrast with the otherwise stylized decoration. Most surprisingly, one is a monarch butterfly, a species introduced from America into Britain in the 19th century, as Paul Crane, the Haughtons' associate, remarked to me. Yet no one questions the authenticity of the painting. The only place where a monarch but-terfly could have been seen by the painter is the Petiver collection of butterflies acquired from America by Sir Hans Sloane and preserved to this day in the Natural History Museum.
The other moth, "Privet Hawk Butterfly," is also naturalistic. It is well known that the Chelsea porcelain painters were allowed in Sloane's "Physic Gardens" to study flowers. Crane concludes that Sloane gave them access to his but-terflies as well. I would go one step further.
The aesthetic contrast, not to say clash, between the two naturalistic butterflies and the rest of the pattern can only be satisfactorily accounted for by a buyer's wishes. Sloane, who was passionate about natural sciences, probably com-missioned the plate. One can imagine him walking in as the Chelsea artist was about to paint two stylized butterflies as he did on the other dish, and suggesting an 11th-hour modification.
An even more astonishing discovery can be seen at the fair. Angela von Wallwitz of Munich shows a vase that once formed part of a set of five imitating Chinese models and decorated at Meissen around 1730-1733 by the strange Adam Friedrich von Lowenfinck. An art historian, the countess wrote in a German art magazine, Weltkunst, the story of the young porcelain painter who ran away at age 22 from Meissen. His artistic boldness irritated managers keen to have imitations of Chinese-style patterns. Instead, Von Lowenfinck indulged in vividly expressionistic birds. As a signature mark, he would insert a bright yellow dot in the upper area of the wings.
Previously unknown, the vase on the Munich dealer's stand is painted with an unreal cock and two hens in intense colors. Its eeriness calls to mind the eccentricity of another 18th-century German Expressionist, the sculptor Xavier Messerschmidt. Both belong to the same strain of wild fantasy that made German fairy-tale writers the greatest in Eu-rope, from Grimm to Hans Hoffman. Less than a dozen vases painted by Von Lowenfinck in that mood survive. The Ceramics Fair is decidedly worth a go.