shipwrecked (宜興紫砂壺)

As if violent storms and vicious pirates were not enough, European trade ships also had to worry about trouble from rival nations. Boarding their ships, stealing the cannon and the cargo, they would usually set fire and sink them, killing everyone on board. Anything to win more ground in the bid to rule the dazzlingly lucrative trade routes that existed between Europe and Southeast Asia and China. From Guangzhou to Malacca, the Desaru almost made her destination-- but alas she was ambushed very close to Malaysian shores.

Ambushed and shipwrecked.

The year was 1830 and the cargo was mostly ceramics. Mainly export-ware quality utility items fired in the kilns of Thailand and Vietnam. There were about 10 large dragon vases, lots of jars and pots-- and among the Chinese ceramics (which comprised 10% of the salvaged cargo), there were some stunning yixing teapots.

My man in Penang-- Lim Kean Siew had a very large collection of yixing teapots. As if the finest education and a lifetime of contribution wasn't enough, upon his retirement from law and politics, Lim set about to dash all the codified notions concerning teapots that had ruled Chinese tea drinking habits for over a thousand years.

Like all cultural practices, these codified rules concerning tea preparation are so taken for granted that-- like air- we don't even seem to notice them anymore. Red earthenware pots for oolong, darker pots for puerh, green tea in porcelain or glass teapots. Lim-sensei asked the obvious question, why? Was there some reason underlying these rules or does it just come down to preference? Setting out to uncover the answer, he went about his task by scientific experiment.

He first outlined his methodological principles:

 All of his pots would come from a government factory in Yixing itself, choosing the Yixing Zisha Factory #1 -- where quality and standards were tightly controlled. He could, in this way, be assured that we were talking of real yixing of a certain knowable standard. His pots ranged from works of art created by living national treasures to simpler, more humble pots-- but all were guaranteed Yixing "purple sand" clay.

In addition, all his teas would be of the highest quality. Water would be standardized. Non-hard tap water. Tea would always be prepared in the same manner and he, along with a variety of tea connoisseurs would observe-- which pots went with which teas.

**

Famous teapots are like movie stars. They have superstar status, and found along with the finest inkstones and jade objects on any scholar's desk, they are prized maybe even above jade. While the history of Yixing-ware can be traced back to 3000 BC, it was only in the Ming dynasty that Yixing teapots took center stage. Discovered by the literati-elite, who came in droves to Yixing (located not far from the legendary city of Suzhou) to enjoy the beautiful scenery and partake in the premium tea grown there, the Yixing teapot was held up as "the ultimate tea-making utensil;" -- the clay "more precious than gold, or even jade."

It is perhaps most reminiscent of the Medieval tea masters of Japan who paid huge sums of money for those large "Luzon ware" tea jars traded in the markets of Manila because they believed the volcanic properties of the clay worked to help preserve fresh tea leaves. So, too, do Chinese tea connoisseurs insist that the clay used to fire Yixing ware interacts with chemicals in the tea to produce the most delicious and fragrant pot of tea possible.

Alchemy, they might say.

My own opinion? I think most people once they use a fine yixing teapot will never go back to anything else.

Earthenware is like human skin. Soft and porous, handling unglazed pottery can be a very sensual experience; soft to the touch, it is warmer and more organic than porcelain or iron (tetsubin), for example. And, nothing is more delightful to the senses that yixing clay. A yixing teapot will also fit right in your hands, perfectly-- like a tiny kitten. I have certain preferences regarding clay color and potting (shape)-- but more pleasing to me perhaps than anything else is the way a handmade teapot's lid fits to the body. It is never a perfect fit like something machine made. But that ever-so-slight human-made gap is what gives a handmade teapot that certain comforting sound (clack!) when you fit the lid on.

**

All I wanted, I told him, was the perfect teapot. Just one, but it had to be perfect-- as if one perfect teapot could make everything right. A seemingly simple task, finding the perfect teapot was elusive as any great chase.

I first spent hours at the Teaware Museum in HongKong studying the teapots and narrowing down exactly what I wanted in my own "perfect pot." I was amazed to discover the way Yixing pots are hand-modeled (without a wheel) out of what is extremely hard clay. Like any great Literati art, one artist alone is traditionally in charge of the entire process from start to finish and therefore the artist's seal will be affixed to the bottom of the pot as it is in every way that artist's creation: one of a kind.

After looking at pots for weeks, I had decided on darker "purplish-brown" color clay of a geometric or square type (no applique, no color) I set out for days on end scouring the shops and galleries of Hollywood Road and Kowloon. I could spend the rest of my life in Hong Kong, and if I did, I would probably end up walking around Hollywood Road most of those days. In the end, I purchased 3 pots, 2 antique dishes shaped like fans, a set of rare yixing teacups and a little water container over the course of a year's wandering there. Looking at them when we were back in Japan , again I was struck how none of them-- save one-- was quite right. My little water container, with its chocolate color clay and delicately etched plum blossoms-- I adore it and think it perfection.

When something is "right" you just know it, don't you? Perfection  somehow fits perfectly in your hands. It is something you long to touch it the moment your eye rests upon it, and no matter how many times you see it, you always seem to find something new about it; something else to fall in love with. It never ceases to delight you, in fact. That is how I feel about the water container. To me, it is perfect and makes the other less-than perfect acquisitions also somehow seem worthwhile as well-- as if it wasn't for them, I might never have stumbled upon that little water container.

**

 So, what did Lim-sensei uncover in all his experiments? Well, first of all, that green tea can indeed be made using Yixing ware. And, puerh doesn't taste any better with black clay pots. Smaller pots are not a necessity for tie guanyin either. He tells us, "One must be reasonable," and urges us to look at the teapots themselves. For his experiments proved that just as tea connoisseurs have been telling us for a thousand years, the teapots themselves will inform us what tea should or should not be used. The wrong tea, a thousand years of tea teachers have instructed, will make a teapot turn pale and dry. And it will give us a less than perfect cup of tea. Earthenware-- like skin-- does react to heat and chemicals in the tea by changing tone or color-- it is visible to anyone using such a pot, and Lim-sensei urges us to stop and taking a deep breath, take a good hard look.

Yes: love=care=really looking.

********************

Recommended:
*This video, 葛陶中制壶全过程, is worth taking a look at to see how yixing pots are entiredly modeled by hand- from start to finish
*This video, the Deseru Shipwreck, is interesting to see the way the yixing teapots were stored inside large ceramic jars or pots
*Lim's experiments are described in his book, The Beauty of Chinese Yixing Teapots.

And Roland Barthes below on the perfection of perfection as being "adorable" whereby:  The object is loved in their entirety-- a state which no word can describe. For want of a better word, Barthes calls this adorable! I call it perfection which is to say, I love you because I love you-- "not for one or another of [their] qualities, but for everything!"

"By a singular logic, the amorous subject perceives the other as a Whole (in the fashion of Paris on an autumn afternoon), and, at the same time, it involves a remainder, which he cannot express. It is the other as a whole who produces in him an aesthetic vision: he praises the other for being perfect, he glorifies himself for having chosen this perfect other; he imagines that the other wants to be loves, as he himself wants to be loved, not for one or another of his qualities, but for everything, and this everything, he bestows upon the other in the form of a blank word: Adorable!"-- Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

"Tulips, Roses, a Pink and White Carnation, Forgets-Me-Nots, Lilly of the Valley and other Flowers in a Vase" (Ambrosius Bosschaert)

Comments

[Paul Rodriguez]

Suddenly my Brown Betty seems so déclassé.

[Sterling Price]

The video is fascinating on every level. Not only seeing the "adorable" teapot being crafted by master hands, but all the very specialized tools he used. Some even performed dual tasks. And what a perfect teapot. He used his right eye, twice I think, when lining up the imaginary line between the spout and handle. And how quickly he moved with purpose, and felt with his hands what his eye might have missed. It was a joy watching this birth. But I'm still a coffee lover.

[Jeff Fuchs]

There is a ritual that exists still in Taiwan's central tea mecca of Nantou, whereby a teapot whose owner has left indefinitely, has a ribbon tied gently around it before being put up on a shelf. This 'marking' tells all that it is a pot that is off-bounds to other tea drinkers and practitioners...it awaits its owner and its owner's tea. It is a reminder of a bond between pot and owner, an instrument and the practitioner - a relationship that is often passed onto the owner's offspring or to one who appears as a true inheritor of this gift. In this same area of Taiwan, the adage of 'less is more' is accurate as the smaller the tea pot (often little more than a tangerine) the more precious - a single pot, a moment alone, a sumptuous tea - a nice little heaven, no?

[facebook conversation]

GS:
fascinating post, as always. searching for that yixing holy grail...

Peony:
You know when I left Japan, I did take the little water container.. I will
always adore it. Miss my teapots tho!

GS
:) yes. one can get so attached. i have about 17 yixing pots, but maybe
only 2 or 3 i can say i love. top is a nice purplish-brown round, almost ufo
shaped one i got in taipei 10 years back. of course it just gets better with
time....
almost like sunken treasure, found one at a yard sale here in New Jersey
for $3! it was a classic shape (saw same one on Bi No Tsubo) with a little
dragon head that pokes out of the top of the lid, and a tongue that pokes
even farther. was deeply stained and somewhat beaten up, well used but not
what you would call cultivated. anyway, like that one too, largely for its
story. became a puerh pot

Peony:
Like you, G, I also love Chinese tea (especially white tea is
my favorite but I love puerh and oolong too)... when you have time, check
out the videos and the book at the bottom of the post. The yixing pots are
like raku teabowls in that they are modeled totally by hand and one artisan
(for the real ones) is in charge of the process from start to finish and so
they do seem to have personality--I love their lids!

Kouros
The journeys you take your readers on, how can one ever
thank you for that? ;) Time to go searching through Vienna's markets for a
nice tea-brewing souvenir for the future. I recently saw one just like
described above, almost UFO shape with a dragon poking his heas out of the
lid and the tongue even further. Or maybe I saw it in a dream.
November 18 at 5:32pm ·

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Peony,

Perhaps you can (if you've not before) say something about how this might relate to the Japanese notion of “Shibusa,” about which I was introduced by Crispin Sartwell in his little book, The Six Names of Beauty (2004). He writes:

“The Japanese language possesses a vocabulary of aesthetic experience that is or ought to be the envy of the West. These words admit of no direct translation into European languages [which reminds of the Sanskrit term ‘rasa,’ about which the same could be said], but they make articulate varieties of beauty to which anyone can have access. ‘Shibusa,’ for example, is usually translated, with radical inadequacy, as ‘elegance.’ The word ‘elegance’ for us connotes a kind of upper-class aesthetic of designer clothes and designer utensils, though admittedly it picks out something ‘tasteful’ as opposed to loud or overly elaborate. Things that are shibui (the adjective form) are refined in the sense of not being gaudy. There is another use of elegance that gets somewhat nearer to shibusa, however: Proofs in mathematics and logic, as well as scientific theories, are sometimes called ‘elegant’ if they are conspicuously economical [in science at least, economy would be one of several desiderata, symmetry, for example, would be intrinsic to the notion of elegance as well: see A. Zee’s Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics (1999)]. And such proofs and theories...are beautiful in proportion to their scope and simplicity. Shibusa as an aesthetic is elegance in that sense, but also picks out a quality that is reflective, understated: things that are shibui are created or experienced with a kind of meditative restraint. Thus the term denotes both a quality of objects and a quality of experience. [....] It captures a quality that is at once aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological, that can be an aspect of what we make, what we are, and what we assert or express. It bespeaks an economy or directness and purity of means as well as a gentle achievement of ends. Shibusa is a way and a place to live.”

Sartwell proceeds to introduce other related aesthetic terms: yugen, wabi, and sabi.

It seems, as Ananda Coomaraswamy reminds us in his essay, “Is Art a Superstition, or Way of Life?”, that we have no use here of the distinction between “fine” and “applied” arts, between “the artist” and “the craftsman,” for “there can be no ‘good use’ without art.”

[peony]

Oh, Patrick, this had to be one of the best comments ever received
here--thank you! And so happy to hear from you. Yes, to everything....and was interested to hear of Sartwell's book, as I had not heard of it. It looks very interesting.

There are two things, which could be perhaps interesting to think about in terms of your comment.

The first is that, I agree, that "The Japanese language possesses a
vocabulary of aesthetic experience that is or ought to be the envy of the West." And this rich vocabulary could only be a by-product of a culture that prioritizes aesthethic values (over efficiency or profit, for example). My own experience is that while my English
language conversations are almost completely devoid of this, in Japanese,beauty-- in particular, the shared appreciation of beauty--is something that is talked about quite a lot. This is one of the big transitions or differences I feel when switching back and forth between languages.

There was an interesting article in the Japan Times the other day, called Know them by their bliss, which included this (backing up my personal experience)

"Youthful peaks concerning aesthetics — artistry or music — were reported far more frequently by Japanese (16.1 percent) than by persons in any other country yet studied. For example, nearly three times more often than mainland Chinese and five times more often than Hong Kong denizens"

I think the other more interresting point that could be made is regarding your comment on the undermining of Kant's objective or detached aesthethic appreciation in favor of art as practice (and this directly relates to my point in the above blog post, such as it is...) that, when art becomes practice, it almost necessarily leads into the concept of the aesthethic as the ethical....(or maybe you could say that it tends to conflate these two concepts more readily than we find in Kantian aesthehtics/ethics) Fingarette, I thought, did a good job of illuminating this
in his book whereby "Confucian sensibility" is not discretely the ethical nor is it discretely the aesthethic but rather it is an ongoing path or never arriving project toward the beautiful as the Good. (and a good that is expressed as beauty)

This quite different from what you see in Scarry's book on Beauty, for example... which posits Beauty's ethical power (as
model-- Platonic smaller beauties leading to greater beauty in contemplation) since the stress is on the "practice of beauty" leading toward moral cultivation (not the objective or detached appreciation of it)....

Anyway, I am still south of you.... if you find yourself in the old
neighborhood, would love to sit down to tea.