A Tea Addict's Journal

Yes, this is the third so far I’ve posted with the same wooden chop “gongju”. After you see enough of these you start to get a sense of the different makers’ styles. Gongju wooden stamped ones like these tend to have a thin spout relative to the body, with an angled cut at the tip of the spout, and thin handles. The lip on the lid is short. They often pour a bit slow because of the smaller spout, which may or may not be a good thing depending on your needs. 160ml.

At what point does an item get past the level of wabi sabi and into the territory of just really badly made/damaged? You decide. 115ml.

This pot’s clay is weirdly spotted. Mark is Wu Desheng zhi, with Wu Desheng being an outfit during the Republican period that made pots. 165ml.

Not all yixing pots were used for tea brewing, or at least that’s the way it seems sometimes. In things like senchado sometimes they were used for water cooling/pouring rather than tea making. It’s not always clear to me why one is designated as water dropper rather than teapot. When there’s a pair sometimes one gets assigned one job and the other the job of tea making. In any case, this pot is called “zini suichu” which literally means purple clay water dropper. 145ml.

This kind of pot some call “starry sky” with the little yellow dots of sand. The mark under the lid is “hen” which literally means “mark” but sort of like a mark left by a knife. 75ml.

This is one of those pots with no marks. I like these a lot. 95ml.

The writing on the bottom of this pot is Yigong, another name that is commonly seen for this sort of pot. Notice little details like how the inner surface of the handle is flat – this makes holding the pot slightly easier than if it’s round all the way. 195ml.

This pot is one of the ones I use most heavily. I got this for a song because its handle was glued back on, but the gluing job was obviously very well done and there’s been no problem. The lion is quite detailed. The pot is stamped “tiehuaxuan zhi”. Tiehuaxuan is the name of a company during the Republican period making yixing pots, specializing especially in smaller pots (lion or shuiping) that have calligraphy and carving on them, like this one. They also make whole sets including pitchers and cups, but those get expensive. The seal under the lid is “Jiangji” referring, probably, to the maker Jiang Anqing who is known for making lion pots. 115ml.

Yes, another one. These seals are pretty common although they come in different shapes and sizes. 150ml.

The “gongju” mark is another one of these generic marks that supposedly mean something at some point, but is used so often it’s meaningless. The earliest ones are supposed to be made for imperial purposes starting in the Ming or the early Qing, but obviously most are much later. 130 ml.