The Fired-clay Yixing teapots, handmade in China, combine artistic expression with and exceptional brew.
It is said that if you use a Yixing teapot for many years, you can brew tea just by pouring boiling water into the empty pot. This is just one of the many wonderful properties of these poetic little teapots. For hundreds of years, aficionados of the many varieties of tea found in China have extolled Yixing (pronounced yeeshing) teapots as superior to all other types for brewing it. The special zisha clay (containing iron, quartz and mica, and found only in Yixing) from which they are made absorbs the delicate flavors of the tea and the teapot becomes more seasoned with each use.
Yixing ware teapots have an interesting history that dates back to the Sung Dynasty (960 - 1279) when purple clay was first mined around Lake Taihu in China. Their unpretentious earthy tones and subtle beauty flourished and matured in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (1573 - 1911). Along with the earliest tea shipments to Europe came distinctive red earthenware teapots, initiating a tea drinking tradition that continues today. A traditional favorite of local scholars and artists, the pots are made from the signature clay of Yixing, an area situated 120 miles northwest of Shanghai in Jiangsu province. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, scholars variously praised, made, inscribed and collected this renowned classic Chinese art form. Now as then, each piece is shaped by hand on a potter's wheel and left unglazed, both because it makes better tea and because doing so allows the color of the clay to shine through.
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