My Yixing Teapots

Thuy asked me to put up photos of my pots. So here they are (minus one as it is very delicately carved on the outside and I have yet to take a photo of it that allows you to see the carving).

What is a yixing teapot? It's a pot made from clay found only in Yixing, China. It comes in different colors and different textures but the main characteristic for which tea drinkers seek it out is that the clay is very porous. Many claim that the clay acts as a sort of filter. I'm not sure about that but I do know that if you take a tea and drink it in a normal glazed cup and then pour the tea into a cup made from the clay, it does taste subtly different. People talk about old teapots having sorbed so much tea over the years that tea leaves are no longer needed to brew a pot of tea in them. Since most people suggest that antique pots be sterilized before use I have a hard time believing the story but it's a nice one.

They are traditionally used to brew oolong teas. Tea leaves are often oxidized or fermented when the are harvested. Green teas are not oxidized at all, while black teas are completely oxidized. Oolongs are any tea that falls between green and black teas. I tend to prefer those closer to black teas but there are many excellent oolongs that are very close to green.

First up is my sad broken pot. You can see the crack in the lid and the glue on the side of the dragon head. What you can't really make out from the picture is that the lid doesn't quite fit into its opening anymore. It used to fit perfectly to the point that it wouldn't fall out when you poured tea.







Below is the same pot from straight on. You could almost pretend that it isn't broken except for the poorly fitting lid and the funny looking eye on the left (the crack runs through the glaze of the eye).














Next is the now infamous pot from my mother (see earlier post about my move). Very cute but not very functional and machine made.














I didn't mention that my father also gave buying me a teapot a shot when he was in China on business. It was a complete surprise for me so I didn't have the chance to warn him that they tend to cost more than your average teapot. He suffered a rather severe case of sticker shock. Still, while this isn't a very well made pot, it is at least partially done by hand and it took a couple of years before I saw similar ones for sale in the United States. It does have a flaw in it that prevents it from being used but we won't tell my Dad that given all of the effort he went through to bring it to me.




















And the last one is my very first teapot. I had recently discovered single estate teas (and you can too) and oolongs when my local tea shop (which happens to be one of the finest in this country) had their annual yixing teapot fest. Since these are the pots in which you traditionally brew oolong I felt that I needed one. For an inexpensive pot, this is a remarkably well done locust and if Marius hadn't packed it full of wet leaves during one of our moves, I'd still be using it to brew tea (it grew mold by the time we unpacked it).