Last Place You Should Get a Teapot From... Yixing

Like anyone starting a Chinese teaware company, the first thing I did was take a trip to Yixing.

Living in Yangzhou, we were fortunate to be only a couple of hours away from the most famous city in China for teapots.  After a train and bus ride we ended up in a little noodle shop down the road from the Chinese Ceramic City.  

Three days later, we were getting on a bus back to Yangzhou without a single teapot we would be happy selling today... so what happened?

It was overwhelming to say the least,  
there were at least 100 studios in this small city block, 
that all sold one thing, Yixing teapots...

Well, kind of.

And this is the weird thing about Yixing.  In order to find this Ceramic City(which really ended up just being a block) you had to take a taxi to the outskirts of town.  

The most famous city in the world for teapots and if you didn't know if was there you could have driven right by it without a second thought. It was a really strange experience especially when you hear all the hype online and talk of the history.  

But we were looking for a potter, a connection, a friend that we could start buying teapots from.

The problem was the more studios we walked in the more confused we got. 

Some teapots were $15 while others were $1,000. They all claimed to be zisha. They all echoed similar language, yet the clays were completely different colors and looked like they had been made using entirely different techniques.

And here was the kicker, many studios would say that other studios were fakes.

How was it possible that all 100 studios were supposedly fake?

We left with more questions than answers.  

So what was the takeaway? 

You Are Not a Professional When You Start

At this point Derek had already been traveling around China searching for tea for 4 or 5 years and had collected some cool teaware along the way.

Unfortunately, while we had some experience, it wasn't enough to discern what made Yixing teapots so great.   

And even today, our professional opinion on Yixing teapots has developed from our experience working with 10s of potters, selling hundreds of teapot shapes, and handling thousands of teapots and it's something you probably won't hear many other places...

Yixing Teapots are great for their craft, not their clay. 

It's not hard to make a teapot any color,
it's not hard to make an ornate teapot,
it is hard to make a teapot that is well balanced, considered, novel, and subtle.  

Which brings us to our second thought. 

Professional Artists are Subtle 

This may very well be the thing that separates every tool,
every painting,
every photograph,
piece of furniture,
or children's book.  

It's about the fundamentals.  

With teapots the same is true.  

(A factor for determining teapot quality: the line of symmetry)

One of those things you'll hear people say about Chinese teapots for testing their quality is that a good teapot should have a flat line from the spout, across the top of the body, and to the handle.  

This idea is a useful fundamental, but only up to a point.

Because there are ways you can break it that work(raising the handle) and ways you can break it that don't work(lowering the spout).  

Now, if you understand why a potter breaks a rule or convention, it may be a fantastic pot.

But, if you see a teapot that is neon blue clay or a perfect carved tree shape, it may be just to make a sale not push an artistic boundary.  

And both of the examples above are exactly what we saw in Yixing.  

$15 pots that were in the shape of a tree... that also felt terrible.  

Since we are focusing on fundamentals is there a list of fundamentals? Are there things I have been told that aren't really as important as they were made out to be? 

Good questions, glad you're thinking about it.  

That video above does go over a number of the criteria that we think great teapots should have but to expand on it...

Here are some must haves for us on handmade teapots: 
- a balanced pot, that doesn't feel too heavy or pull the front of the pot down too hard
- a lid that doesn't leak out the top when pouring 
- proportionally adjusted spouts and handles to the size of the pot 

Here are some things that we find nice to have: 
- smooth pour with and without tea in it 
- clay or porcelain that feels good in the hand 
- filter that is designed to accommodate different types of tea
- low size to weight ratio*
- clay bodies that patina
- pots that have a satisfying and smooth lid for spinning 
- covered air holes so you don't accidentally cover them 
- unique textures
- low center of gravity 
- wide lid openings 
- clay that has a particular affect

*Ex. weighs 74g, holds 175g(ml) of water

Now, one thing that you'll notice about the lists above is there are a lot more "nice-to-haves" than "must-haves".  

This largely comes down to the fact that there are so many teapot forms. Once the fundamentals are understood, rules can be bent, conventions can be challenged, and the result can still be an amazing teapot.

One of the things that excites me most about receiving a new high-quality pot is discovering a feature I haven't seen before. A skilled artist can change the way I pour, hold, or interact with a teapot—not through novelty for novelty's sake, but by pushing craft into art.

but...

Clay Isn't Magic 

One of the reasons it took us so long to release a full line of Yixing pots is because we were so scared of the clay.  

In fact we have more negative responses and comments when we talk about Yixing than any other concept we talk about.  There's someone ready to fire off on how much more they know about Yixing clay than we do.  

And here's the thing... That may be true.  

But, 

In a world with thousands of potters, clays, pot shapes, and traditions, it's hard to buy into the idea that one material alone is responsible for greatness.

and here's why.

This idea that Yixing clay is better than all other teapots in the world has a few holes in it that I can't wrap my mind around. 

First, if you look at the major teaware regions in China—including Rongchang—they all use clays that share remarkably similar core characteristics.

High iron clays that can be fired to a semi vitrified state in an electric kiln that remains slightly porous to affect tea's flavor.  

In simple terms, red clays. 

In fact even the brown Qinzhou and black Jianshui clays are red when fired in oxidation(they're reduced in the kiln and sanded or burnished to give them those colors).  

So all this variation, all these different clays are very similar in the spectrum of clays you can produce. 

Second, in our experience and hearing firsthand from potters in Yixing and Chaozhou, the clays that they use are actually imported from Anhui and other provinces for the large majority.  In fact one potter in Chaozhou(many of whom are friends with all the other potters) said they only know one potter in the whole city who uses Chaozhou native clay. 

When you really think about it, the 10s or 100s of thousands of pots that are handmade each year in any given pottery city it would take an incredible amount of the exact same clay to make this one specific clay zini, zhuni, or whatever other clay you want to say to keep up that production. 

What we think is more likely is that many modern clay bodies are formulated recipes designed to recreate desirable characteristics consistently. That's not unusual in pottery, it's standard practice.

So when you hear "zhuni," it's often less useful to think of it as a single clay and more useful to think of it as a category of clay with characteristics people have come to value. It's a clay body that has characteristics similar to an old clay that people grew fond of and created to match.  

It's not fake, it's normal in pottery. 

It's part of the process.  

So, are Yixing pots worth it? Absolutely.

But due to the complexity we think they are the last teapots you should buy, after you've learned what a teapot can be, rather than the first ones you pick up simply because you recognize the name.