Yixing Travel Guide

 

 

Yixing is crowned as the

Pottery Capital of China

 . It is featured of its charming landscape, long-standing history, culture and diverse folk customs. As a milk-and-honey land, it is splendid in

Pottery culture, tea culture, bamboo culture and cave culture

 . It is an important tourism destination in Southern China.

Yixing is located in the

Taihu Lake

  drainage area of Yangtze River Delta. It is bordering on Zhejiang and Anhui Provinces. It is the south-most county-level city in Jiangsu Province. Yixing has fertile farmland, mild temperature, sufficient rainfalls and distinct four seasons, it is teeming with rice, bamboo, tea, stream-crabs and Taihu fish and shrimps. Historically, it was named Jingxing. Many historical and cultural relics are here.

Zisha Pottery (Purple-Clay Pottery)

  of Yixing began from the Northern Song Dynasty and flourished in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. It is a craftwork showing calligraphy, painting, poem, character-carving and sculpture together. 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 with 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.

Highly prized for its porous nature, which is excellent at absorbing the flavor of tea, Yixing clay occurs naturally in three characteristic colors: light buff, cinnabar red and purplish brown. Other colors are created by mixing these three or adding mineral pigments; for example, the dusty black color is obtained by mixing in cobalt oxide and the blue color is made by mixing in magnesium oxide. A principal factor in determining the depth of the color is the concentration of iron in the clay. All the characteristic Yixing colors are called zisha, but the most celebrated of all Yixing wares is its zishayao, or purple sandware, in which a relatively high concentration of iron produces a deep purplish brown color, sometimes called "pear-skin." Western tastes tend to run to a wider range of colors other than the prized zishayao.

Traditionally,

Yixing pots

  were small so that each person might have their own. The tiny cups were proportionate to the pots, so that drinking 100 miniature cups a day might not be considered excessive.

One of the special attributes of a zisha teapot is its ability to retain heat. Minute pores produced in the clay during firing retain both heat and flavor, and the low shrinkage rate of Yixing clay allows the skillful potter to make a closely-fitting lid that inhibits oxidation thus heightening the tea's flavor. The Yixing teapot is free of lead, arsenic, cadmium, and other toxic materials. Because of the unique properties of the Yixing clays, Yixing ware is unlike other unglazed earthenware teapots. The

Yixing teapot

  has a fine and solid texture, a four percent water absorption rate, a very low thermal conductivity, and a double air hole design which enhances the pot's brewing properties. The principal standards for evaluating a teapot's brewing quality are the color of the tea soup produced and the level of tea phenol, caffeine, and aminophylline. The performance of the Yixing teapot is far superior to that of the standard teapot with respect to all four of these criteria. Hence, not only are Yixing teapots beautiful and unique works of art, but they are excellent brewing vessels.

In 2006, State Council released the first list of non-material heritages. The

Zisha Pottery

is ranked the first place. The craft-masters since ancient times inherited from the older generation and taught this marvelous technique to the younger generation. Yixing is the biggest tea plantation area in Jiangsu Province. This area belongs to the subtropical climate, the tea called Yangxian Tea was the royal exclusive tea with the same fame as

Dragon-well Tea

  in Hangzhou and

Biluochun Tea in Suzhou

 .

Yizing is also rich in Bamboo product. It is the largest bamboo base in Jiangsu Province with the total area of 18 hectares. The natural caves are also famous to be the brand card of Yixing. Especially Yixing is the most famous to be the professor cradle. More than 8,000 professors and associate professors come out of this area. 7000 years ago, Yixing was the center of west area of Taihu Lake. It was the biggest city in the west of

Taihu Lake

 for more than 1000 years.