Woots wrote:edkrueger wrote:Happy to help. I made a lot of mistakes at first with "yixing." Hopefully, you won't have to.
Yes the more research I did with Yixing the more pitfalls and traps I found. Its why I stepped back a few paces and decided to get a lot more serious with my research before I jump in.
Thanks again for sharing your experiences. Yixing does seem appealing to me; the history and tradition, as well as the taste that develops over time.
Are the 1920's pots from 5000friend real antiques or faux antiques? If they are real my concern was do they know what kind of tea was used with them over its history? (do they tell you in the packaging materials)? Or after 80+ years of non use does the seasoning process wear off... thus making it not important?
I have read several places its important to only use 1 type of tea per Yixing pot forever cause the flavor builds up on the untreated walls.
With the way China has become very industrious over the last decade +, and Chinese culture becoming very affluent, I have read the Yixing business there has began to boom (due to extremely high demand). The sad thing is when that happens its hard to find the "high quality" products in the myriad of mass produced low quality pots. For this reason I think the antique Yixing pots are the way to go. I just want to be sure if I buy a antique Yixing that I continue to use the type of tea the original owners did.
These questions seem to rage on this forum from time to time, with what's "real" or not. I've heard from other forum members that 5000friends basically sells fake vintage. Regarding the "one tea, one teapot" theory, I don't buy it. If that were true, you're going to need a lot of teapots. I follow the school of dedicating one teapot to a kind of tea, like one for greener oolongs, one for roasted oolongs, one for wuyi, etc. But it also depends on how much money you have, because if you can't afford only nice teapots, you might have tons of mid-quality teapots or a handful of really really nice teapots.
Regarding "antique" yixing teapots, they can be expensive...really, really expensive. My Uncle, who used to sell yixing teapots, said that the really cheap ones are really cheap, and the good ones are overpriced. Antique yixing is better because the clay is bound to be "authentic," but it takes so much time and energy to be an expert on clay composition, and even at that, there's always the possibility of being fooled. My advice would be to never overpay for any yixing teapot, unless you can absolutely trust the vendor with your life. Oh yeah, "authentic" yixing clay doesn't really exist anymore, since it was all mined during the 50s and 60s, so the clay we get now is just a close approximation. In terms of vendors, Yunnan Sourcing seems to be pretty solid. The prices are not bad, and the teapots are of sound quality.
