A Tea Addict's Journal

So we started out with definition, went on to a little more about the historical sources, and then onto some more practical issues. None of these, however, really define what zhuni is. Let’s give that a try.

I think very strictly speaking, to those who believe in the orthodoxy, zhuni is only those clay that came from Zhaozhuang mountain in Yixing that can be classified as Shihuang clay. Everything else is, well, something else.

Walt raised a question in private with me though, and it’s a good one – what about clay that may be more or less the same as that particular kind of clay? And also, clay from that vein is not going to be the same throughout, and this does not even begin to account for the preparation that went into them, the processing, making, firing, etc. So, how do you know what is zhuni, and what is not? What if there is another place that produces clay that are pretty much the same thing?

I think the short answer is: I don’t know, and I honestly don’t think anybody else knows. With zhuni it is a little harder to define, but let’s say we’re trying to establish that a pot is made by Famous Potter X. Famous Potter X made lots of them. Famous Potter X has a distinctive style, and is recognizable to people in the know. One pot fits all the characteristics of Famous Potter X pot. However, Famous Potter X does not remember (or claims he does not remember) whether he made it or not. Is this pot made by Famous Potter X?

This is actually a real problem for people who collect these “famous potter” pots, made by modern masters who are often still alive. You go and ask them, and because they made these early on, or made them and didn’t like them, or whatever, they claim they didn’t make it. Everybody out there who’s seen hundreds of his pots can tell this is not a fake — based on things like craftsmanship, clay, etc. He might even admit on a “off-the-record” basis that he made it, but won’t issue a certificate for it. That’s no good for commercial purposes.

In the case of zhuni, I think it is more murky. First of all, how many people really know what it is? I’ve met maybe half a dozen people who can probably tell you right away if something is faked or not with reasonable accuracy, but I don’t think any single one of them will tell you they’ve never been fooled — in fact, all of them have, at one point or another. The forgers are quite skilled.

So, you have these people who do know, more or less, what zhuni is. They base it on the hundreds or thousands of pots they’ve seen in their lifetime, and have collected enough information to make an informed decision. I think this is not unlike somebody drinking an unmarked cake of puerh of unknown vintage and assessing its quality that way — you base it on what you know. It might not be accurate — lots of factors, mostly unknown, are involved, but you make the best judgment you can, and some people can make it better than others.

In many ways, that’s all we can really do. We can’t get magically transported back in time to see what happened, and written sources are quite rare. We could, of course, look at true antique pots, but many of them are of somewhat questionable provenance, and the ones that are almost guaranteed to be real are often in museums or collectors’ hands, out of reach for most of us.

In any event, the purpose of this series is just to explore one of the terms that often get bandied about on the internet, while I think very few actually are aware of all the complex background involved. Zhuni, in the strict sense of the word, is basically an extinct clay no longer being produced. Modern variants or new mixes claiming to be the same exist everywhere, but by and large, the ones I’ve seen do not impress me as being the same, based on texture, feel, and sometimes, taste. Then there are pots out there that have nothing to do with zhuni in any way, but the term is nevertheless used as a synonym for any sort of red clay. That, I think, is irresponsible, and misleads consumers and tea addicts out there without better sources of information. It certainly doesn’t help when the same claims come along with the story of how this clay is extinct, etc etc. If it sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve seen it before, and also because similar tactics are employed often in other realms, from puerh to lots of non-tea related things. Sales pitches are all the same. Sometimes it’s an honest mistake, sometimes it’s not.

As for us, well, tuition money is always in order. Yixing pots, unfortunately, is one of the more expensive hobbies for a tea addict. While they are not quite consumable as tea itself, they do carry a high price, and a high ratio of forgeries. I’ve heard so many stories of forgers in the 1980s in Taiwan making boatloads of fake pots, because there was a huge bubble that grew out of it that eventually popped. The bubble might have burst, but the pots remain. The only suggestion I can offer is stay smart, observe, and learn from the past.

Walt asked two questions which I thought I should address at some point. Might as well do it here as he commented on yesterday’s installment.

First question: I guess the practical question then would be can you taste a difference between what you are sure is hongni vs what you think is zhuni?

I think this is a pretty complicated issue and will generate as many answers as there are people answering. If I can rephrase it another way, the question is basically whether or not zhuni makes any real difference at all, compared to other types of clays. Does it make better tea? Why is it coveted anyway? What’s all the fuss about? Why is it that the term gets bandied about so often as if it’s the Holy Grail of Yixing pots?

Let me try to address the “does it make better tea” question first. The most common answer I’ve heard with zhuni is that because of its high density, it brings out the higher notes of a tea better than other Yixing pots made with more sandy mixtures. It is most suited to make younger teas with fragrant notes, and will really accentuate teas such as Taiwanese oolongs or, perhaps, a nice young puerh. For teas that have lots of mixed flavours, such as a wet stored puerh, I’ve repeatedly heard people comment that zhuni pots is probably not your best bet.

When people cite high density though, it does make me wonder if you might not do better just with a gaiwan or a porcelain pot, say from Jingdezhen. They are marvelous pieces of art that have an even higher density than zhuni. Why not use those? The counter is, sometimes, that “well, zhuni still breathes a little, whereas porcelain doesn’t at all”. Ok, that may be true, but it doesn’t really answer the question of why that amount of breathability is ok, and a little higher or lower is no good.

I have a hunch that part of the reason zhuni is coveted has relatively little to do with its intrinsic value in tea making, and a lot to do with its relative rarity and its entertainment value. The clay really shines. When I first fished the broken pot out of the bleach bath and rinsed it with water, I was struck by how it has a sheen that normally you only see on well seasoned pots. Zisha pots that are just cleaned don’t look like that at all. At the same time, however, the surface has texture. What’s more, after rubbing it a bit with my hands, I noticed that it started soaking up some of the moisture and oil from my skin, and the colours changed ever so slightly. I know this sounds crazy, but I am quite certain that between the pristine condition of a post-bleach bath and after a rub-down, the pot did change its look.

This sort of thing is a collector’s dream. It’s much the same as how many of us season our pots religiously, and grow fonder as we watch them age in front of our eyes with each use. Zhuni might just be particularly good at showing that transition, and gains a glow that really accentuates that sort of effort.

What’s more, the clay is supposed to break relatively easily during firing, which means it is comparatively rarer. Add on to it the fact that what we commonly recognize as zhuni is now no longer extant, and you’ve got the perfect combination for a collector’s item. It also means it’s a great place for a professional imitator to go work — why fake cheap stuff when you can go for the high priced ones that few have seen?

The second question is a more general one: how much difference does one pot make?

I think the first and most important part of this answer is that it makes a lot less difference than the quality of water and tea going into the pot. As far as I can tell, those things affect the outcome far more than the teapot used.

Now, having said that, I think I can say that different teapots do make teas taste different. I brew aged oolongs in multiple pots. I don’t usually mix different teas in the same pot, but since I only drink maybe two or three kinds of teas regularly, having a pot that only brews dancong, for example, means I’ll never use it. Since I want to season my pots and also want to use them, I use them all for the same kinds of tea.

What I’ve found is that the same tea, brewed in different pots while holding all else constant, will taste different, sometimes significantly so. I just drank the same aged oolong for three days in a row now, in three different pots. The first is an extremely thin skinned hongni pot. The second is my default aged oolong pot, which I now think could actually be a Japanese Bizen ware. The third is pot number four in yesterday’s six red pots. I can safely report that they all tasted quite different. The thin skinned pot made the best tea. The zhuni one (if it’s zhuni) had the sharpest taste, and incidentally, also the most noticeable sourness among the three.

This would, in fact, be anecdotal evidence that zhuni does, in fact, bring out the higher notes — both good and bad. So whether or not it’s really good for your tea or not might just be a bland “it depends”. However, I do think pots make a difference in how a tea comes out.

Finally, a technical issue — I am trying to take pictures with this

And my attempts have had some mixed success

Any thoughts on how I can better do this? I suppose getting a holder of some kind might be a first step? Are there lenses out there that will do this job? I await the photographers out there to help me solve this problem.

Time for some pictures, since the weather was nice today to permit some picture taking.

In order to make sense of colours and texture, there is unfortunately not many ways to do it other than looking at stuff. What do they mean when they say pig-liver, for example? Or vermillion, for that matter?

I tried here to show the range of possible colours from what I have on hand. We can leave duanni and the more exotic colours out of the picture, since most of them are probably not very natural anyway (blue, green, etc). I think pig liver is somwhere in the middle of the range here — one of the purplish/brown ones. Those, of course, don’t fall into the category of zhuni clay. So here there are six that I think obviously clear themselves out immediately for “zhuni” qualification. But then, you have the ones leftover

What about these?

Let’s label them one to six, with the front row (closer to us) being one to three, from left to right, and the back row being four to six. Number one here is actually a Tokoname, so that rules it out for zhuni status. Five and six are very new, with five being explicitly a hongni creation from a friend who commissioned the pot, and six being a pot that I bought brand new three years ago. So those are out, if we go by the theory that zhuni no longer exists, at least in terms of the Zhaozhuang mountain variety. That leaves two, three, and four.

Two is a pot I bought a while ago, broken. I posted about it then. I believe this is an actual zhuni pot of some vintage. I recently cleaned it, while leaving the lid in its original pre-cleaned condition. Some more pictures might explain better

It is quite smooth, but not glassy. In toki’s words, feeling real zhuni is like feeling very fine sand. That, of course, depends on exactly what kind of mixture went into the pot, and may differ somewhat, but I’ve seen some purported zhuni pots that are very glassy. I don’t think those are the right ones, and are probably modern imitations/fake. It has a natural sheen before I’ve done anything to it — this is after some intense bleaching that got rid of any patina. It also has some shrink lines, but I think it’s also significant that the shrink lines are not that regular — I’ve seen pots with very regularly spaced shrink lines, which once again I think are a result of attempts to imitate zhuni behaviour.

Number three is very similar in clay to number two. It never struck me until I compared them side by side. I’ve always used that to make dark oolongs, and have had it for more than five years now. I bought this one used and for a not very cheap price, so perhaps this also qualifies?

Number four is more of a question mark. It is one of those that have large particles embedded in the clay. It certainly looks more convincing to me than the glassy “zhuni” pots, but is it real? I don’t know. This I purchased at the store where the owner has literally hundreds of purported old pots. Some look genuinely old. Others are a little more iffy. The jury’s out on this one.

So, the basic definition is out of the way, but it doesn’t really get us anywhere now, does it? For 99.99% of us, knowing where an extinct source of clay is from really doesn’t help us any when it comes to evaluating the material in question, which is zhuni.

This is the part where it gets tricky. Upon my reading of Qing texts on Yixing pots, the first thing I noticed is that by and large, the pots coming out of the kilns were described variously as “pig liver colour” or “much like iron or metal pieces”. Some are also described as a brownish colour. Rarely, if ever, do I see anything about pots being in vermillion. In fact, in the whole of Yangxian Mingtao Lu 陽羨名陶錄 (The Record of Famous Pottery from Yangxian – Yangxian is the old name for Yixing county) the only place I found the word “vermillion” is in the line that describes Zhaozhuang mountain Shihuang clay. That’s it. Nowhere else.

So, the historian in me wonders, is the fascination with zhuni really a later phenomenon? If the Ming masters all made pots that used what we probably now recognize as zisha, rather than zhuni, then why all of a sudden do we have this great fascination with zhuni, with the astronomical prices to go along with it?

Unfortunately, I don’t think I have an answer to that particular question. It does make me think that zhuni pots, as we know them now, tend to be manufactured after the initial golden period of Yixing pots. There are probably economic reasons for this — if the original clay was unweathered, and therefore harder to process, then it would make sense that until you have greater resources, you will forego the use of such clay in favour of other things that are more immediately available. It also makes me think that if somebody claims they have a zhuni pot from, say, the late Ming, it would sound very suspicious. Otherwise we should have at least seen more of a mention of it.

Or, alternatively, they are simply rarer. This rarity argument would go a long way towards helping the value of zhuni pots. But something else makes me think this is not the case — the teas that were being drunk back in the day were very different from the teas we are drinking now. They did not have fresh, vegetal oolongs to drink. They did not drink beany green longjings. They roasted their teas, even green teas (more like Hojicha, perhaps). Oolongs, in a form that we would recognize now, is more or less a 19th century invention. Zhuni’s claim to fame is that it accentuates the high notes of a tea much better, and will allow them to flourish in a brew. It’s not usually noted as a type of clay that will clean out odd flavours as well as some of the zisha. So, maybe, the taste and production of tea changed and therefore the requirements for clay also changed.

Perhaps the most coveted of all kinds of clays for Yixing teapots is zhuni. Information on zhuni is very thin in English, and often they contain questionable or conflicting viewpoints. What exactly is zhuni anyway? I don’t pretend to know all the answers, but I do have some theories and ideas from observations as well as written and material sources. I’m going to try to see if I can get at least a few things straight here. I will try to make this a multi-part posting, since it is too much material to cover in one go. Comments are more than welcomed.

First of all, let’s start with the name. Zhuni 朱泥 is, literally, vermillion clay. Vermillion is really a orangy reddish colour, not quite red in our normal sense of the word, but somewhere in between. It’s certainly not a darker red such as crimson or even maroon. Strictly speaking, according to old sources from the Ming and Qing dynasties, vermillion clay only comes from one place, Zhaozhuang 趙莊 mountain in Yixing. There are two types — soft huangni, and stone huangni. The difference between the two is that the soft kind has been exposed to weathering, whereas the stone variety has not and is still in pretty solid form, and needs extra processing to get it to workable condition. The stone variety, when fired, is what produces the vermillion colour.

I think it is already pretty obvious from the above description that not all red clay is zhuni. In fact, red clays of all stripes exist, but only one kind should be called zhuni. There are those out there who will say “anything red can be called zhuni” or some such; that’s simply incorrect. It’s like saying all green teas are longjing — that’s simply not true.

However, because you never really use 100% pure zhuni to make pots (for structural reasons, I’m told) there is always a mix going on, and the mixture you use and the formula involved, the preparation work done, and the firing procedure all influence the eventual colour of the clay, colour alone is not a reliable and definite indicator. It does, however, give you some sense of what’s going on. These days a lot of so-called zhuni pots have a very dark reddish colour — that’s usually a good indication of the use of some pigment to achieve such a colour, rather than a natural outcome of the firing process. It all depends, of course, but that’s at least a start.