A Tea Addict's Journal

Everyone love posting about things that they bought, especially when they are interesting, a bargain, or great in some way. I’m guilty of the same, but I also think that some of your lesser purchases, especially wrong purchases, are at least as instructive as the great ones. After all, if you don’t know what’s bad, you can’t tell what’s good. One who only drinks 30 years aged puerh cannot know what is great about it until they’ve tried faked 30 years aged puerh.

So in that spirit, I present you a few duds that I have purchased over the years. These are generally failed gambles on eBay and other such sites. For everyone that is a win, there is at least one that is not.

These three pots, I think, represent three types of fake pots that you can find. Now, a general rule of thumb – the point of faking a pot is to either make it look old, or to make it look like a famous maker made it. Here, I am mostly concerned with the first type, because the second type is everywhere, and even seasoned collectors I know cannot tell the difference – a perfectly made pot bearing the perfect replica of a famous master’s seal is going to be pretty difficult to tell. A yixing dealer in Taipei told me that she can sort of tell, but all kinds of funny business happens to make the whole process rather haphazard. Old masters might disavow earlier works (either to prop up the value of newer works, or because they don’t like the old ones) and brothers, cousins, and what not often borrow the famous maker’s seals and even clay to create their own pots, but sold under the famous maker’s name. That type of forgery is not what I’m talking about here.

The first I want to talk about is the metal looking thing. First, a closeup

Now, this is trying to pretend like it’s a pewter-wrapped teapot. Those things have clay on the inside and a layer of pewter on the outside, with calligraphy and painting carved into the body of the pewter, which is soft and easy to work. The real McCoy costs at least a few hundred USD, at a minimum, and have nephrite jade handles and spouts. In other words, great if you can fake it right.

These things, however, are not that. Instead, what they are, as far as I can tell, are plastic handle and spouts that, from a distance (especially in a picture) are difficult to tell apart from a jade. Also, the body’s metallic sheen is probably from a thin layer of aluminium foil, wrapped around the clay body of the pot. One key difference is that the bottom of the faked pots generally display naked clay, whereas the bottom of the real pewter pots have a layer of pewter at the base of the pot.

Also, you can see that the “carving” is not really on the “metal” but is rather wrapped under it, at least if you look carefully. I did a casual search on eBay and I found at least three or four of these, some of which have bids from buyers who, I’d imagine, are falling for the trick.

The second type here is the famous, or infamous, shoe polish pot. They don’t necessarily have to be shoe polish. It can, in fact, be anything, as long as it’s black and oily. The point of the shoe polish is to make the pot look dark and old and used. Except that old, used pots that are dirty don’t look like that. They look like this.

One of the most obvious signs of shoe polish is when you see black streaks. Notice that over the body of the pot, the black is not even, and that they appear streaky when examined closely.

Also, if you can examine it in person, you’ll feel that the surface of the pot is somewhat sticky. That’s a sure sign of something else other than natural dirt. It also is impervious to bleaching, as I tried yesterday to test it out.Organic compounds left behind by natural tea drinking will wash away very easily when you bleach the pot.

Also, if you can see the interior, you’ll see obvious problems.

That’s right, the pot is pristine inside, while super black outside. Nuff said. This particular pot seems to have been made with some kind of clay on a wheel, as you can see evidence of it having been thrown on some pottery wheel. The clay is much lighter in colour than yixing clay – probably shantou or some such. Somebody even bothered to put a seal at the bottom of the pot, which, of course, is pointless. Funny enough, the seal is sideways.

The last I want to show you is sort of the reverse of the above. In this case, the interior of the pot has been deliberately dirtied-up to make it look old. The surface of the pot has this weird white stain that won’t come off. Inside, you can see residue of some yellow gunk, something that looks like dirt, and some remnants of what might be tea leaves. It smells funny too.

The pot is also ginormous, and is completely useless. It comes with the fake seal of Gu Jingzhou, one of the greatest yixing masters of the 20th century.

Pots like this one are ALL OVER eBay. Don’t even try buying them. I can imagine if this pot were to have no surface issues and clean inside, it might actually fetch an ok price – not exactly masters price, as 99% of the Gu Jingzhou on the market are fakes, but it’ll at least be, possibly, a usable pot. Now, it’s just a worthless piece of junk.

This is the last problem with tuition pots – not only did they cost you money (not too much in any of these cases, thankfully), they also eat up space, and become a sort of albatross. I can’t give it away, or sell it. I suppose you could give it to places like Goodwill, although even that seems rather evil. You could just throw it away, which I’ve thought about doing. Right now, I’m considering using them as practice pieces for gluing – I need to repair something, and to get the best results, I should probably practice how to glue things together first. Breaking these apart, then gluing them up, might be the best use these pots have seen since their creation.

“Made during the Ming, a pair of hat-lidded teapots, treasured items”. These are not my words – they’re the words of Sato Kian, who was a mid 19th century artist in Japan and whose inscription graces the front of this box and whose signature and seal are on the back.

Inside are two little things that are most interesting.

Things like this can be a little hard to use, and I haven’t quite given it any thought what I’ll do with them. The “hat-lidded” reference sort of makes sense – the lids are on top of the pot, much like a hat, rather than fitting completely over an opening or some such. They have “overhangs” that go over the top and wrap around the body, and the spout is a very cute, classic three point spout.

Are they really Ming? I can’t say for sure. Are they old? Yes. They’re not going to be as functional as, say, a new shuiping that you can find easily in a store and pours flawlessly, but as you’ve heard many times before, I like these quirky pots. These are no different.

I got this pair of pots recently, and haven’t had a chance to use them, clean them, or do anything with them yet. They’re an intriguing pair, because of the clay, and the work. As my regular readers would know, I normally prefer pots that are on the rough side, that show the artisan’s workmanship, and sometimes, of previous owners’ attachment to them. This pair, like many of my other pots, show another interesting thing: uneven use over time.

The one on the left has received far more attention from its previous owner than the one on the right, which, although having some stains, is really quite lightly used. As a result, you can see, much more clearly, the shrink lines on the left pot. It is even more obvious when you lift the lid, and see inside – the interior of the left one is far, far darker than the right one, which only has a light dusting of tea patina. It’s not obvious to me why the previous owner preferred one to the other, although I suppose one gets used to a certain pot and just keeps using it. I suspect that if I were to use these, I might end up doing the same.

I guess what interests me, at the end of the day, with these pots is that each one, in its own way, seems to tell a story. At least, I can imagine a story being told by them, which is why I like them over pots that are new and perfect – in those cases, the pots lose their personality and become a mere vessel in which to brew tea. These two pots are imperfectly fired – there are air bubbles on the interior of the pot, but since they’ve been subjected to frequent use, I’m going to assume that things were just fine. Care, such as warming the pots slowly, must of course still be exercised.

One of the most common things I’ve seen asked on forums is where to find small pots. By small, I mean pots that are under perhaps 60ml or so in volume. I think there’s certainly something to be said about using pots that are not overly large. For example, one person could hardly drink enough tea to justify using a pot that’s over 200ml. That’s huge, and will require lots of leaves and probably longer and fewer infusions. If you fill a 300ml pot with 1/3 full of dry leaves, that’s probably 20g or more, which might not kill you, but will certainly cause caffeine highs and other undesirable outcomes. So, there’s something to be said about small pots.

Small pots also have another benefit which older tea texts claim exist, which is that they retain the flavour of the tea better than large pots. Whereas large pots are seen to allow a tea’s qi to float out of the pot, smaller pots will retain it within its body and, presumably, deliver it to your cup. On a more practical note, small pots use less leaves, are relatively easier to control when brewing, and are easier to handle, so there’s something to be said about small pots.

I think, however, that below a certain size small pots become very difficult to use. Mind you, I have a lot of them – some as small as 30 or 40ml in volume, but I almost never use them, and have them around mostly as curiosity pieces. The reasons are really twofold. The first is that small pots, once they are below a certain size, actually start getting harder to use again. The amount of water you can pour in there is small, and therefore the room for error is also smaller. For leaves that expand a lot, you really can’t use very many leaves at all, and the pots often will have lids bulging out simply because the leaves have soaked up water. I also find them to be slightly unsatisfying – perhaps that’s the caffeine addict in me talking, but I find a pot between 80-120ml to deliver the right amount of tea for me, whereas pots that are smaller have trouble doing that.

Moreover, they are not very suitable for certain teas, unless you’re interested in crushing the leaves. Wuyi yancha, for example, or dancong, are likely to have leaves that are too large for a small pot to handle whole. Even some puerh will be too large, and require serious breakage for a small pot of, say, 50ml in capacity.

Also, and this is quite important, I think tea really isn’t meant to be a one-person consumption affair. It’s meant to be shared, probably in a few cups with different people. Drinking alone is common in the West, but less so in Asia. Which is why I think pots that are overly small are harder to find – they limit the number of people who can share in the cup. Some are only as big as one small cup of tea – such as my pot with stitched lid, but that means I can’t use that pot as soon as I have a guest, or even if I just want to share it with MadameN. That, I think, is deeply unsatisfying.

This is one of the most beautiful pots I own.

It is also one of the ugliest.

The reason I say that is quite simple – if you look at it from afar, the pot looks quite nice.  If you look closely, it has all kinds of flaws.  The shape is uneven, the body is slightly collapsed on one side, and the lid, oh the lid — you can see how it seems to be sinking on one side, and it’s not even round — in fact the pot is not round.  It is more like an oval.

As you can probably imagine, the lid doesn’t fit all that well.

Yet, there’s beauty in this.  All too often, I find newer pots to be entirely without character or personality.  A pot that is made exactly to shape and size is, in my opinion, very boring — I can find a million of those in any tea market, anywhere.  Give me a tea mall and I can find you a thousand perfectly made shuiping pots of all sizes.  I can assure you, however, that walking through a tea market for a whole day will not yield one that looks like this pot I have here.

All those supposed tests for trying out a new pot — whether or not the water will stop if you cover the air hole (this doesn’t), whether or not the lid will fall if you fill the pot with water and the flip the pot around (I haven’t tried, but I’m sure it will) and whether or not the pot has all its elements lined up perfectly in a straight line (no, once again) are, when you think about it, completely useless for tea brewing purposes.  There will never, ever be a situation where, mid-pour, you just need to stop the pour by covering the air hole.  Nor is there any real reason behind why a perfectly fitted lid will brew better tea (think the airhole that allows flow doesn’t leak air? think again).  So, these so called “well made” tests are, in effect, tests of whether or not a pot is made to perfection.  Why, yes, sure, they can be done by hand, but so can a machines.  Why do you need paintings when you have photographs, if perfection and precision is what you want?

I like this pot because it has personality, and because it’s full of contradictions.  Looking at the pictures, you may think it has very rough skin, but in fact, when you touch it, you’ll find that it’s silky smooth.  Its shaped with quirks that you only find in older pots – a slightly upward bending spout, a joint line that isn’t even remotely concealed, clay that still shows you what’s in it, and of course, the lack of any filters.  Pots like this one make me very happy – they tell a unique story that you can’t find anywhere else.  No wonder MadameN calls them my concubines.