/ck/ - Food & Cooking

is yixing a giant meme?
it seems like, short of traveling to china and witnessing your teapot being sourced and then made for huge $$$ there's no way to be certain what sellers claims as toward teapots is what you're actually getting. there's so much reported fakery, adulteration, and outright lies that it colors any vendor, no matter how venerable they seem, with suspicion

why don't western potters just make their own unglazed teapots? back in the 1700s-1800s they used to
surviving examples go for huge $$$ nowadays
surely it's not more work to just leave the teapot as is after bisque firing, it's more work to put the glaze on

and yeah yadda yadda yadda muh special clay but i'm not convinced the special clay matters all that much, how many of you actually have done the chemistry to decode how much if any purple clay benefits any given tea? none of you, it's all colloquialism and truisms. all stonewares are semi-porous if they're fired low enough. high iron red clay exists all around the world.

i think western manufacturers are sleeping on this opportunity while china gets to run all over the market and there's potential to be had for a potter to start making real yixing competition