Teapot and Drinking Vessel Design Approach Nature from the East and West part 1

“Under the shape of a bamboo hat on hot days, tea quenches our thirst. Whether one or two, the Buddha never tells,” wrote Zhu Angzhi, landscape painter and revered calligrapher, across the side of a sublime purple clay Teapot of Bamboo Hat Shape by Chen Hongshou (1768-1822) and Yang Pengnian (active late 18th-early 19th c.) (fig.1). [1] Palpable shade still languishes beneath its gentle brim, which holds the essence of deflected sun in a gently textured surface infused with bamboo’s stalwart earthiness, and inscribed with calligraphic characters mirroring the frenzied dance of summer insects.

Nature abounds in Yixing teapots, collaborative late Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasty masterworks of artist-scholars, potters, calligraphers, poets, painters, and seal engravers. Quintessential literati object of the East, the Yixing teapot is one of dual refinement—as much intellectual vessel as pragmatic artwork—addressing the architecture and forms of the natural world on both intensely cerebral and purely aesthetic levels. Seal carving, calligraphy, and poetry were seamlessly incorporated into teapots crafted as art objects and received as cultural icons. Scholars determined the design parameters of these intensely sophisticated creations, controlling proportion and size, dictating construction methods, selecting suitable clays—all through the exacting lens of interpreting antique objects, geometric shapes, mundane aspects of life, and organic phenomena as teapots.

The remarkably cultivated purple clay (zisha) was purportedly unearthed by a now legendary Monk of Jinsha Temple from local deposits in Yixing, Jiangsu Province and revealed to incredulous villagers who were instructed to dig in a nearby cave [2]. From 1510 onwards, it was meticulously crafted into diverse forms: Pear, melon, and gourd shaped teapots abound in the classic repertoire of Yixing designs. More fancifully eccentric forms populate the list of eighteen forms created by Chen Hongshou (Mansheng) (1768-1822), magistrate of Liyang county, according to the Qianchen mengyinglu: waning moon, pearl, spring in the olden days, heavenly cock, horizontal cloud, spring vitality, and the deliriously complex “shape formed by joining two rice measures with one inverted onto the other” [3].