With tea consumption in the U.S. having more than doubled since 1990, according to Bon Appetit magazine, holi-day shopping lists this year might do well to include something delectable or decorative for the tea drinker. Contrary to the stereotype of tea drinkers as stogy, pipe-smoking Anglophiles, tea has become a mainstream beverage, considered good for one’s health, conducive to social interaction and complementary to the rising popularity of Yoga and Feng Shui. An artistic twist on the trend comes in the form of whimsical teapots and tea sets, notes Peggy Boskey founder of the website Teapot Treasures .
“Taking tea is one of life’s creature comforts, a time to sit and sip alone or relax and chat with a group of friends,” says Boskey. “And nothing enhances the experience of fine-tasting tea as much as a teapot hand crafted by an artist. In my pursuit to find unique teapots for my own collection, I discovered the creations of some wonderfully talented artisans. It was then that I decided to put together a large selection of contemporary ceramic, cast iron and china teapots to delight the eye along with the palate.”
Besides teapots and tea sets, Teapot Treasures offers additional suggestions for the tea lovers on one’s holiday list:
    — Ceramic tiles designed to protect a wooden table from a hot teapot
 – Body Tea - herbal tea for the bath & eyes
 – Children’s tea sets
 ”Buyers of our one-of-a-kind teapots signed by the artist and recreations of ancient Chinese Yixing teapots don’t necessarily even drink tea,” adds Peggy Boskey. “They appreciate the fine craftsmanship and collect them as affordable works of art.”

From the Air China logo to the icon that twisted the Olympic rings into the image of a man doing taiji, Han Meilin’s visions are everywhere.
Now the famed, versatile and prolific artist who created some of the country’s most recognizable imagery will stage China’s largest-ever one-man art show at the China National Art Museum.
Han, in fact, will take over every exhibition hall to display more than 3,000 new pieces from December 31 through January 13.
His last solo event, a 1999 exhibition, lured more than 50,000 viewers, he predicts this one will be even bigger and more successful.
He didn’t even know if he will be alive to see it. Han, 65, is recovering from a major heart attack and bypass sur-gery earlier this year.
The artist says he still possesses the creative enthusiasm of a young man and his prime has yet to occur.
The works in show were created over the past two years by him and his assistants and students. They span a vast range of formats that include painting, calligraphy, sculpture, pottery, wax printing, grass weaving, bull skin tapestry, red sandalwood carving, bronze weaponry and clothwork tigers.
The display’s highlights include a series of calligraphic work called “Heavenly Characters,” bronzeware sculptures such as “Little Animals,” ink paintings of nudes, Junci porcelain works and Yixing-style purple clay teapots.
Junci is the oldest and one of the most important styles in Chinese porcelain art. Yixing teapot is an art from East China’s Jiangsu Province.
Many of the works weren’t made inside a Beijing studio but out in the countryside.
“I don’t like creating artistic works ‘behind closed doors,’” Han said.
Han led his 20-member group - including seven students - across China on a 30,000-kilometre mini-bus trek through eight provinces. They sought inspiration from local folk arts.
Viewers will be amazed by the range of Han’s versatility. “If an artist wants to keep developing, he should master different artistic genres - not only calligraphy, sculpture or wax printing but also music and literature,” he said.
A 1960 graduate of the Central Academy of Arts and Design, Han certainly takes his own advice.
In 1980, learning that no Chinese was invited to attend the international seminar on China’s porcelain kilns system held in New York, Han made dozens of trips to the five major porcelain kilns in China to acquire porcelain-making skills.
Now colossal sculptures designed by Han can be seen in many Chinese cities.
His granite sculpture of six tigers now stands in Dalian, a port city of Northeast China’s Liaoning Province. It is more than 43 metre long and weighs 4,800 tons.
His “Five-Dragon Clock Tower” ranked No 1 in the International Sculpture Competition organized by the Interna-tional Olympic Committee and the Atlanta Olympic Committee in 1996. It is now a permanent fixture in Atlanta’s Olympic Square.
Han’s creations are well-known even by those who don’t realize whose they are. He designed the much sought-after stamp for the Year of the Monkey in 1983 and the 1985 Panda stamp. The red phoenix logo for Air China and the taiji logo for the Beijing 2008 Olympics bid campaign also comes partly from his fertile mind. (The bid logo was co-created by designer Chen Shaohua.) Han has held several personal art exhibitions since 1979 in cities such as Beijing, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Taipei, New York, Boston, Toronto, Singapore and Paris. New York City even honoured him by designating one day of his exhibit there, October 10, 1990, as the Han Meilin Day.
“I believe that Chinese artists can create work at the highest level if we can perfectly integrate indigenous art with contemporary concepts,” the artist said.
Han hopes his work appeals to ordinary people, not critics. Critics look at art pieces from the academic viewpoint and don’t take much interest in folk art elements, he griped.
Indeed, Han worries greatly about the future of Chinese folk arts.
“The market for traditional Chinese handicrafts keeps shrinking and many factories are facing bankruptcy,” he said.
Many traditional art works need a lot of handiwork, including lacquerware, wax printing, tie-dye and grass weaving articles.
But high prices for handmade products have scared away ordinary Chinese people. The old-fashioned designs of the traditional handicrafts don’t interest foreigners, either.
This is why Han is expanding beyond making his own art into an effort to rescue Chinese folk arts. He offers free training around the country in the technical aspects of these crafts.
His art studios, too, are efforts to impart wisdom. He opened his first in eastern Beijing in 1989, and now has sev-eral that include sites in Henan and Shanxi provinces and one in Shenzhen.
“My studios are far from enough to save folk art,” said Han, calling on more Chinese artists to join him in the cul-tural mission.
Han has drawn from his own life experience in his artistic career. During the “culture revolution” (1966-76), Han was forced to leave his post as a lecturer at his alma mater and to take up a job at a pottery workshop in East China’s Anhui Province. There, he suffered distress, imprisonment, insult, poverty, illness and separation from his family.
“Life with hardship is not always a bad thing for artists,” Han said, calmly recalling those nightmarish years. “The hard times in my life made my will power strong and served as a major motivation for my ceaseless artistic creation.” During his frequent journeys to rural areas across the country, Han, shocked by the vast rural poverty, began to donate schoolbags and sets of stationary to children there.

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.

Dressed in a bright red Chinese shirt and with her eyes wide open, Tseng Yu-hui sits at a table, concentrating on proportions of tea leaves and their infusion time.
The Taiwanese tea master opened her Maison des Trois Thes (House of the Three Teas) on the Rue Mouffetard, a lively Parisian street in the French capital’s fifth district, two years ago. Today, she is writing a guidebook about tea and has set up her own Web site on the Internet.
Tseng prides herself on having created the first traditional Taiwanese style tea house in Europe that offers quality and range - there are 40 kinds on the menu, and many other kinds for sale.
“There is no school to learn about tea, and the art of tea, which used to be passed on from generation to generation within families, is disappearing,” she said.
Following a long apprenticeship, Tseng has become a genuine tea master. She has been practising the art since her childhood, first with her family in Taiwan’s Nantou region, then with several tea masters. When she was a child, her grandfather used to wake her up in the middle of the night to have her smell the scent of the “Queen of the Night”, a special flower that blossoms at night only once a year.
Yet growing up in the world of tea plants and preparations does not fully account for Tseng’s rare mastery which, as she explained, came about as a result of manifold skills. She explored fields as varied as music, calligraphy, martial arts and traditional medicine. “All of these experiences are part of the understanding of the spirit of tea,” she declared.
Tseng practised acupuncture in a Taiwanese hospital for two years. Later, as a clarinetist, she won top national awards in Taiwan in 1970 and 1971. Her musical skills carried her to Europe and eventually to Paris, where she decided to stay in 1990. Two or three times a year, Tseng returns to Taiwan and China. She likes to stroll in tea gardens and walk the hills of Fujian and Zhejiang, and even ventures into the remote mountainous areas of Tibet.
Within the very private club of tea connoisseurs and growers, Tseng has developed an important network. The “Tea Road”, as she calls it, allows her to pinpoint the right soils and best vintages before going there herself to taste the newly harvested teas. “Tea leaves are handpicked and then undergo several operations, from seasoning and withering to fermentation,” she said. Each step is carefully monitored, with time and heat being important factors. Storage is yet another delicate operation.
Her trips back to Asia are akin to treasure hunts. Selecting high-quality teas and discovering rare and old varieties requires good connections and a great deal of time.
Some top range teas, prized in competitions, can cost up to US$ 20,000 a kilogram. Fortunately, not all high qual-ity teas are sold at such prohibitive prices, yet each time she returns to China her best-informed clients order some of her very best and most expensive teas.
Mastering the preparation of tea also means knowing how to use the right implements. First of all, you need the right teapot. Tseng gets hers from traditional potters in Jiangsu province, where the famous Yixing pots are made.
“One variety of tea, one kind of clay. Colored teapots and rather ferrous clays are good criteria. You have to watch out for fake Yixing artifacts,” said Tseng.
To find the right clays and pots, Tseng goes to small and highly protected quarries. The choice of the right pot also depends on its technical qualities, such as its “air-tight aspect”. And there is a great demand for some pieces: “There are many collectors in Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong. In Taiwan alone, there are about one million (collectors). This does not mean, however, that they are tea connoisseurs.”
A visit to Tseng’s tea house is a subtle form of entertainment as she readily discusses the spirit of the earth and tea-leaves, the fragrances and blends of teas - much like a wine expert passionately talks about the aroma of a good wine, its vintage and qualities.
Sometimes she organizes meetings with confirmed amateurs.
“You should see them,” said Fabien Maiolino, Tseng’s enthusiastic partner. The meetings start around 8.00pm and last well into the early hours of the morning. People talk endlessly about the color of a tea, its resemblance to a fruit or a flower - “that such a thing can happen with French people is just unbelievable,” Maiolino said. “They can spend a whole evening tasting only three sorts of tea. And when they come here, they know they should not wear any make-up or perfume because it would spoil the scents and flavors of the teas.”
The smell of bamboo coming out of the earth, the perfumes of flowers and coconut and the flavor of honey are among the many references used by initiates. It often takes time to translate and adapt Chinese words describing the consistency of tea, and some amateurs seek advice from the agronomists at the Paris botanical garden.
Tseng has won wide recognition as a tea master and has her own mastership seal. An increasing number of trendy tea houses and shops in Paris call on her for her expertise. Her outstanding sharpness never fails to astonish: She can even tell what type of plant grows in the vicinity of a tea garden.
Tseng recently established a partnership with the famous George V tea club in Paris. There she organizes tea workshops to introduce French amateurs to the basics of the complex art of brewing Chinese tea.
Participants are first taught about the history of tea, its cultural and sociological environment. They learn that the practice of infusion goes back to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) - in earlier periods, tea was stamped and boiled. They also learn about the main regions for tea plants and the importance of weather and soils, and that in Taiwan there are about seven harvests a year while there are only three in China. They are told how to differentiate green tea from yellow, red and black teas, or how to sort out varieties of green-blue teas.
Getting down to the ritual of the actual preparation, one carefully watches how to first rinse the teapot, inside and out, as well as the leaves to avoid burning them. The teapot is then filled until it overflows so as to get rid of the froth. It is a scrupulous process which offers its greatest reward when one breathes the the scent emerging from the cup. Tseng herself spends hours every day tasting and smelling, breathing and inhaling out of sheer pleasure and to the delight of her customers.
Asked about the right water to use, she sighed, saying that this was in fact the hardest part of the job. After testing many mineral waters, she decided the best thing to do was to filter tap water. “Actually, the best would be to use the famous Galloping Tiger spring water in China, but we can’t afford it,” she said.
Today, tea houses in China are popular places where you can enjoy having a drink and some food, she said. In Sichuan province, there are about 200 of them. In recent years, Taiwanese have opened fashionable tea houses on the mainland.
But most of China’s tea rooms are not places where you can appreciate the quality of tea, according to Tseng. One must keep in mind, she said, the damage done by the Cultural Revolution. Tea at that time was associated with Con fucianism and “the old ideas”. The Red Guards destroyed many 800-year-old trees and entire varieties were lost.
The Chinese “spirit of tea” or gong fu cha is quite different from the complex Japanese tea ceremony, in which etiquette and measured gestures are more important than appreciating the qualities of the tea itself. Sitting on a cushion on the floor in Tseng’s soberly decorated room, one can enjoy infinite varieties of the beverage and dream about their mysterious names: Long jin (dragon’s well), tie guan yin (iron mercy goddess), bai hao (oriental beauty), dong ding (ice peak). Or fall under the poetic spell of green-blue teas, with their rising twirls of delicate full-bloom scents.
Close your eyes and enchanting visions of the foggy landscapes, mountains and rivers of a Song dynasty painting, come to mind.

THE Chinese are particular about their teapots, and the Zisha teapots, produced in Yixing in China’s Jiangsu province, are considered the best.
Zisha teapots are made from purple clay -about 1 kg of Zisha can be extracted from one tonne of raw clay.
It is believed that tea brewed in a Zisha teapot will not develop an overboiled taste nor will it turn sour when kept A Zisha teapot will also absorb the tea and after long usage, one can enjoy cups of tea from the pot by just adding boiling water without using any tea leaves.
About 100 200 Zisha teapots, priced between $ 28 and $ 1,388, are being displayed daily at Takashimaya SC Shopping Centre until Oct 22.
The first Zisha teapot was created during the Ming dynasty, by a pageboy named Gongchun.  Some teapots have been collectors’ items alongside Chinese calligraphy, jade carvings and snuff bottles.
Rare productions, by well-known teapot craftsman Gu Jingzho, can well fetch $ 120,000 in Hongkong art and crafts shops.
All the Zisha teapots made from the area bear the stamp of the craftsman.  It takes approximately two months to produce a handcrafted teapot decorated with calligraphy and paintings from literati.
To preserve a pot’s uniqueness, each craftsman in the Jiangsu factories does not produce more than 10 duplicates from each design.

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 17 (Bernama) — For the first time, the world will get to see the treasures salvaged from 10 ships, which sank in the 14th to the 16th centuries as well as the 19th century, at the Malaysian Archaeological Ex-hibition at Muzium Negara starting Nov 15.
Museums and Antiquities Department Director-General Datuk Kamarul Baharin Buyong said today the ships in-volved included the Risdam, Nassau, Diana, Flor De La Mar, Nan Hai and Desaru.
The year-long exhibition would give a full chonology of the ceramics recovered from the ships, he told a media conference here.
He said research on the ships which sank in 1370, 1380, 1400, 1460, 1540 and 1550 had shed new light on the ce-ramic trade in Southeast Asia in the pre-colonial era.
He said ships that sank in the 17th to 19th centuries did not carry a lot of procelain but data and artefacts salvaged were important in understanding more about the trade route in the region then.
Kamarul hoped that the exhibition would stoke the interest of both the locals and foreigners in archaeology.
On the discovery of a 19th century ship south of Desaru in May, he said the artecacts in the ship would be recorded this year and next, after which the ship would be raised from its resting place 20m under the sea.
He said the significance of this discovery by Nanhai Marine Archaeology Sdn Bhd would be investigated and mapped together by museum personnel, which would provide a platform for transfer of technology in maritime arc-haeology, a fairly new venture in Malaysia.
He said the department had taken several measures to ensure the safety and authenticity of this shipwreck and the site would be proposed to be declared an archaeological site and any unauthorised diving activities would be prohibited.
Nanhai Marine Archaeology Sdn Bhd managing director Sten Sjostrand said the ceramics on board the ship were mainly Chinese blue and white porcelain, made for the Southest Asian markets.
The ship’s location in the deep muddy bottom had protected and kept the pottery in pristine condition despite its age, he said.
The ceramic samples recovered so far included blue and white porcelain dishes and plates from the Jingdezhen kilns in China, famous for fine quality porcelain.
Other valuable objects salvaged are teapots from the Yixing, which is known for the manufacture of the best quality teapots until today. The stamp in the base of some Yixing teapots indicate a manufacturing period of 1821-1850.
There are also pots made during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).
So far about 645 pieces of ceramic have been taken out from the surface of the ship since early June.
“A piece of hull plank taken from the ship, which is about 30m in length and 7m in width, shows that it was made from cedar and pine (that does not grow in Southeast Asia) indicating that the ship was built in China,” Sjostrand said.
He said that as no similar ship from this period had ever been reported, the ship’s remains and construction details were of the greatest importance for charting shipbuilding techniques prevailing in Asia around the 19th century. $137:Newswire

Metaphorically, really. I’m more interested in conveying ideas than I am tea. In 1980, I first came to Montana. I love the expansive landscape. But I don’t know that the landscape really affects the work. I’m working out of a political landscape, really. I’m getting good reduction. I’ve reduced the, uh, oxygen level in the kiln. The flames just come jumping out because they’re literally seeking oxygen. Just putting a little more gas in so it’ll fire a little quicker. I do about a four day firing cycle. Drives my wife crazy. Uh, you know, I get up every two hours to check the kiln. I was born in Chicago shortly after World War II. (projector clicking) I’ve always made things by hand. When I was a kid, I was constantly making models. My father was an immigration lawyer. We had many gifts from Chinese clients in our house. And so, from a very early age, I became very fascinated with the intricate, with detail, with very tight meticulous carving. When I was a kid, I remember seeing the very stark footage of the discovery of the concentration camps. The piles of bodies. Had a very, very strong impact on my life. I’m carving ears. There are two different clays that I layer so that what I get in the end is something that looks very much like sedimentary rock. It’s part of this ongoing project that I call “The Legacy Project.” And it consists of a pile of ears. The pile keeps changing and there’s so many different layers of meaning. You know, the fact that ears have long been used as a way of counting the dead in war. The other thing about the pile of ears is I was very much trying to recapture the sense of the pile of shoes after the Holocaust, the remains of people that are gone. So they are ears that are stone-deaf. They’re not learning the lessons that are all around us. You know, I work from a place that’s deep inside me. That-that I’m very passionately angry about. I’m pissed off that there are nuclear weapons, you know? If an artist can’t say what they really feel in their heart, you know, what the hell is the point? (strained): Okay… Got it. The vessel is really the primary canvas of ceramics. And the teapot is the most complex of vessels. You can really play with a lot of images and juxtapose a lot of different images to build a narrative. Urban destruction from World War II becomes a teapot. This is the handle… uh, the lid right here, this kind of lifts out. And, uh, this rubble creates a vessel which connects with this kind of tilted, broken chimney which becomes a spout. The yixing teapot was literally invented in Yixing, China, about 1,500 A.D.. Suddenly, there is an explosion of creativity. All different forms, from segmented forms to natural forms to geometric forms. I’m inspired by these pots. I’m inspired by the craftsmanship, the finesse of line, the compositions. But while I imitate the pots in a technical, and sometimes esthetic sense, I’m not making Yixing pots.

For the first time, the world will get to see the treasures salvaged from 10 ships, which sank in the 14th to the 16th centuries as well as the 19th century, at the Malaysian Archaeological Exhibition at Muzium Negara starting Nov 15. Museums and Antiquities Department Director-General Datuk Kamarul Baharin Buyong said today the ships in-volved included the Risdam, Nassau, Diana, Flor De La Mar, Nan Hai and Desaru. The year-long exhibition would give a full chonology of the ceramics recovered from the ships, he told a media conference here.  He said research on the ships which sank in 1370, 1380, 1400, 1460, 1540 and 1550 had shed new light on the ce-ramic trade in Southeast Asia in the pre-colonial era. He said ships that sank in the 17th to 19th centuries did not carry a lot of procelain but data and artefacts salvaged were important in understanding more about the trade route in the region then. Kamarul hoped that the exhibition would stoke the interest of both the locals and foreigners in archaeology. On the discovery of a 19th century ship south of Desaru in May, he said the artecacts in the ship would be recorded this year and next, after which the ship would be raised from its resting place 20m under the sea. He said the significance of this discovery by Nanhai Marine Archaeology Sdn Bhd would be investigated and mapped together by museum personnel, which would provide a platform for transfer of technology in maritime arc-haeology, a fairly new venture in Malaysia. He said the department had taken several measures to ensure the safety and authenticity of this shipwreck and the site would be proposed to be declared an archaeological site and any unauthorised diving activities would be prohibited. Nanhai Marine Archaeology Sdn Bhd managing director Sten Sjostrand said the ceramics on board the ship were mainly Chinese blue and white porcelain, made for the Southest Asian markets. The ship’s location in the deep muddy bottom had protected and kept the pottery in pristine condition despite its age, he said. The ceramic samples recovered so far included blue and white porcelain dishes and plates from the Jingdezhen kilns in China, famous for fine quality porcelain. Other valuable objects salvaged are teapots from the Yixing, which is known for the manufacture of the best quality teapots until today. The stamp in the base of some Yixing teapots indicate a manufacturing period of 1821-1850. There are also pots made during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). So far about 645 pieces of ceramic have been taken out from the surface of the ship since early June. “A piece of hull plank taken from the ship, which is about 30m in length and 7m in width, shows that it was made from cedar and pine (that does not grow in Southeast Asia) indicating that the ship was built in China,” Sjostrand said. He said that as no similar ship from this period had ever been reported, the ship’s remains and construction details were of the greatest importance for charting shipbuilding techniques prevailing in Asia around the 19th century.

Well, I use the teapot only metaphorically, really. I’m more interested in conveying ideas than I am tea. In 1980, I first came to Montana. I love the expansive landscape. But I don’t know that the landscape really affects the work. I’m working out of a political landscape, really. I’m getting good reduction. I’ve reduced the, uh, oxygen level in the kiln. The flames just come jumping out because they’re literally seeking oxygen. Just putting a little more gas in so it’ll fire a little quicker. I do about a four day firing cycle. Drives my wife crazy. Uh, you know, I get up every two hours to check the kiln. I was born in Chicago shortly after World War II. (projector clicking) I’ve always made things by hand. When I was a kid, I was constantly making models. My father was an immigration lawyer. We had many gifts from Chinese clients in our house. And so, from a very early age, I became very fascinated with the intricate, with detail, with very tight meticulous carving. When I was a kid, I remember seeing the very stark footage of the discovery of the concentra-tion camps. The piles of bodies. Had a very, very strong impact on my life. I’m carving ears. There are two different clays that I layer so that what I get in the end is something that looks very much like sedimentary rock. It’s part of this ongoing project that I call “The Legacy Project.” And it consists of a pile of ears. The pile keeps changing and there’s so many different layers of meaning. You know, the fact that ears have long been used as a way of counting the dead in war. The other thing about the pile of ears is I was very much trying to recapture the sense of the pile of shoes after the Holocaust, the remains of people that are gone. So they are ears that are stone-deaf. They’re not learning the lessons that are all around us. You know, I work from a place that’s deep inside me. That-that I’m very passionately angry about. I’m pissed off that there are nuclear weapons, you know? If an artist can’t say what they really feel in their heart, you know, what the hell is the point? (strained): Okay… Got it. The vessel is really the primary canvas of ceramics. And the yixing teapot is the most complex of vessels. You can really play with a lot of images and juxtapose a lot of different images to build a narrative. Urban destruction from World War II becomes a teapot. This is the handle… uh, the lid right here, this kind of lifts out. And, uh, this rubble creates a vessel which connects with this kind of tilted, broken chimney which becomes a spout. The teapot was literally invented in Yixing, China, about 1,500 A.D.. Suddenly, there is an explosion of creativity. All different forms, from segmented forms to natural forms to geometric forms. I’m inspired by these pots. I’m inspired by the craftsmanship, the finesse of line, the compositions. But while I imitate the pots in a technical, and sometimes esthetic sense, I’m not making Yixing pots.

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.

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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.”

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.

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.

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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Fambios knows her stuff; much of her information comes from a slew of books on the subject (see sidebar), which can be ordered through your local bookstore or via Web sites. Most stores, from the larger ones like Chapters and Indi-go to the smaller neighbourhood vendors, generally have sections on collectibles.
Second-hand shops, like S.W. Welch on St. Laurent Blvd., also have books on collectibles you can buy for far less money.
For Fambios, the artistic teapots are more valuable than the fun, contemporary ones. “I’ve really started appreciat-ing the art involved in a great deal of them,” she said. “I’ve got some from Russia that were made by artists and are purely decorative. If you spend time examining their detailed work, you really fall in love with them.”
She stressed that people collect for different reasons. “If you’re doing it for fun, you don’t really look at the price tag, because you’re not looking to increase your investment. If, on the other hand, you do collect for the investment value, you tend to buy more conservatively.”
Whatever the reason, yixing teapot collecting can be a fun, and even profitable, hobby for people of all ages and incomes. And let’s not forget that most are functional, too. Tea, anyone?
For Teapot Initiates
Collector’s Club
- Cardew Design North America Inc., P.O. Box 8208, Paducah, KY., United States 42002-8208. Or call their New Jersey office at (877) 922-7339.
Books
- Teapots: The Collector’s Guide, by Tina M. Carter. Book Sales Incorporated, 1998
- Design Icons: The Teapot, by Guy Julier Aurum Press, 1999
- China Teapots, Pottery and Porcelain (Antique Collector’s Pocket Guides) by Pauline Agius. Parkwest Publica-tions, 1997
- The Eccentric Teapot: Four Hundred Years of Invention, by Garth Clark. Abbeville Press Incorporated, 1996
Web Sites
- The Teapottery for British collectibles: www.teapottery. co.uk/index.htm
- Yixing Teapot site for lovely, collectible and functional teapots from China: www.yixing.com
- Hall China Collecting site devoted to the Hall China Company’s famous teapots and other products, sold since 1903: www. inter-services.com/HallChina/
- The Tea Zone, site of the Tea Council of Canada for everything you’ve always wanted to know about tea: www.tea.ca/
- For a lovely line of Russian teapots and other porcelain items (the site partly under construction), try: www.gzhel.com/
Local Stores
A few of the stores in the Montreal area that sell collectible teapots:
- The Linen Chest has a nice selection of limited editions, including the popular Fitz and Floyd line. Stores in Centre Rockland, Promenades de la Cathedrale, Galeries Laval and Place Portobello in Brossard.
- The Shayne Gallery for one-of-a-kind teapots designed by Canadian artists, 5471 Royalmount, T.M.R., (514) 739-1701
- The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Gift Shop, 1379 Sherbrooke St. W. (514) 285-1600.
- Rob McIntosh outlets also carry such collectible teapots as Fitz and Floyd as well as a Russian line called Lomo-nosov. They have a location at 2335 Trans Canada, Pointe Claire, (514) 697-4885. They have their warehouse outlet in Lancaster, Ont.

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.

“The Dormouse is asleep again,” said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea upon its nose.
- A Mad Tea Party from Alice in Wonderland
Whether done by those who are quite mad or otherwise sane, the pouring of tea has been a custom for thousands of years, since its alleged discovery in 2737 BC by Chinese Emperor Shen Nung. This was quite accidental, as a tea leaf is said to have fallen into a bowl of hot water he was drinking. In 1716 AD, the first tea shipment arrived in Canada, imported by the Hudson Bay Co. This was certainly no accident.
Also no accident are the minions of collectors of teapots worldwide, such as Cote St. Luc accountant Maryse El-malem, who has allowed her love for tea and its paraphernalia to become an obsession.
What is remarkable about her collection, which she numbers at more than 1,000, is that it has been assembled over a very short span of time.
“In 1993, after my husband had passed away the same year I lost my father and mother, I was in Australia and I visited a few stores that sold teapots,” Elmalem said.
“I said to my sister that I needed a hobby, something to keep my thoughts focused on anything but the terrible year I had gone through. I saw this cute teapot in a window, a shoe-house with a little mouse inside. I fell in love with it and bought it on the spot. It was my first yixing teapot and cost me about $110.”
Since then, the mother of three adult children has spent countless thousands on teapots of every size and descrip-tion. Many have been purchased in other countries - England is a hotbed of collectible teapots, Elmalem pointed out, proudly showing off a Laurel and Hardy teapot she purchased at Harrod’s - but many she also buys through her favou-rite mail-order supplier, Cardew Design, founded by Paul Cardew. His designs are done for his own line, but also for companies like Royal Doulton and Disney, with his zisha teapots produced at the Cardew Studio Range in Woodmanton Farm, England.
Cardew’s teapots, counting the collector’s item you receive for joining the club at an annual cost of $80, are shown in the catalogue mailed to you quarterly. You also obtain up to 25 per cent in discounts for purchases, making the cost worthwhile for Elmalem. She is always waiting for a teapot to arrive and was eagerly anticipating delivery of six new ones.
“Let me show you the one teapot I want more than anything,” she said, opening her Cardew catalogue to the page with an admittedly stunning image. Called Eterni-Tea, it’s in fact a sculpture of an Atlas-like male, supporting a three-dimensional, gold-lustred teapot globe on his back. The price? A lofty $ 3,995 U.S., numbered and limited to only 500 worldwide. “I’m dying to have it,” she admitted, adding, however, that at this price she might have met her match.
Limited editions are what attract most collectors, meaning they are all numbered and limited in production, as well as occasionally signed by their artist. Fitz and Floyd is a popular producer of limited editions, including a line of six famous international churches, of which Elmalem is missing only one. Her Notre Dame Cathedral, based on the one in Paris, is particularly striking.
Also very eye-catching are the many teapots, many of them limited editions, based on Warner Brothers’ zany ani-mated characters like Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird and Pepe Le Pew to name just a few, plus some representing classic TV shows such as I Love Lucy.
Do you like rodents? Disney features teapots with mice like Mickey and other famous characters. Some teapots even play a tune when wound, much like music boxes. Interestingly enough, Elmalem added that many teapots are made in Sri Lanka today, making that country a kind of mecca for collectors.
In addition to the mail, Elmalem buys her teapots at Montreal stores, when she can find them. Her second purchase was made at a store in the Le Rouet chain. The Linen Chest carries some lovely ones, including limited editions, as does the Shayne Gallery in Town of Mount Royal, which showcases one-of-a-kind items created by local and other Canadian artists, like Quebec’s Gary Merkel and Ontario’s Lorie Schinko. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts gift shop also might yield a treasure or two.
Department stores like The Bay have interesting teapots on occasion, but not limited editions.
The Internet auction site eBay is another popular source for teapots, but Elmalem issued a warning. “Many of these are not packaged properly and are broken during shipping, so it’s best to stick to a reputable dealer.”
Will she ever stop collecting? “Not as long as I breathe,” Elmalem said. “My life is based on teapots now. Through them, I’ve developed friendships, relationships. … On special occasions in my life, people know teapots are my pas-sion.”
Nicky Fambios of Laval also collects teapots, although her more modest, albeit impressive, collection numbers in the low hundreds. The working mother of two young boys considers herself an “informed amateur,” who started hun-grily gobbling up information about teapots after she discovered how beautiful they can be.
“In the past, I saw teapots as purely functional, not really decorative or collectible,” Fambios said. “Then, a couple of years ago, a friend was getting married in Creemore, north of Toronto, and I went into the little village and stopped by a small tea shop, which sold these. I was really smitten with them.”
Fambios began doing research online and became a collector, learning what makes certain pieces more collectible and valuable than others. “For instance,” she said, “the Hall China Company is the largest manufacturer of teapots in the U.S. They make the popular Aladdin teapots (shaped like genie lamps) in cobalt blue … a five-cup size sells for about $ 300 and is limited. The cream-coloured ones are worth a lot less, because they are not limited.
“Then there are the renowned Yixing teapots, which come from a tiny village of the same name in China. These are highly sought after because they come in many aesthetically pleasing and artistic shapes. They are also porous on the inside and absorb the flavour of the tea brewed within. For that reason, it is not recommended that you brew more than one type of tea per pot.” Yixing’s Zisha teapots are available in 110 different designs and are fashioned from a purple or red clay that is only found in Jiangsu province.

ZishaTeapot.co.uk is a leading online retailer of quality Yixing Teapots and tea accessories. We were established in 2006 in the city of Yixing Zisha teapots 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 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.

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.

A popular brand of  Chinese teapots contains lead and cadmium 100 times the level considered safe by United States standards.

Consumer Council and Customs officials are scrambling to carry out their own tests and obtain test results from US researchers who have found the chemical contents far exceed US safety levels.

Known as zisha teapots, the blue and white dyes on some dark-red pots are found to release lead and cadmium, a cancer-causing substance, at a rate of 50 parts per million (ppm) after coming into contact with hot water, alcohol and acid.

This means the rate is 100 times greater than the 0.5 ppm for both substances judged safe in the US. Consumer Council chief research officer Connie Lau Yin-hing said Hong Kong levels, following international standards, were 5 ppm for lead and 0.5 ppm for cadmium, but the findings had raised serious concerns.

“We will do our own tests now and, if necessary, we will alert consumers,” she said.
A spokesman for Yue Hwa Chinese Products said the company labelled lead content warnings in both English and Chinese on most dyed pottery, including zisha about yixing teapots.

ZishaTeapot.co.uk is a leading online retailer of quality Yixing Teapots and tea accessories. We were established in 2006 in the city of Yixing Zisha teapots 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 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.