Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Posted by 醉茶生 at 09:51 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Categories: Tea Related Teapots

This is my own Yixing teapot sitting on my computer keyboard [a Macbook].  This teapot pours just enough tea for two cups.

My first attempt at a Chinese tea party was met with laughter and not a little derision. A teapot made for the Chinese tea ceremony (gongfu cha 工功茶, see previous post) may be as small as a plum and even a six person pot is no larger than an orange. To English eyes, it looks like a tea party for toys, and not something to be taken seriously. This is what incited the laughter of my English friends who thought at first that I was joking.

Everything about gongfu cha is small. The pot is small, the cups are small. The cups are only just larger than a thimble, but the connoisseur still attempts to finish a cup in three sips and not in a single mouthful. That things are small is one of the four essentials of the Chinese tea ceremony. The reason for this obsession with smallness may be summed up in a word: control. With the smaller teapot, it is easier to control the proportions of tea leaf to water, the temperature of the pot, the pouring of the tea and a million other details. Teacups for gongfu cha are small for the same reason that white wine glasses are small: it allows you to better control the temperature of the beverage (incidentally, there is no mysterious scientific reason for this: it is simply that you can finish that portion of drink quickly enough before the temperature changes). By contrast, the kettle for boiling water for gongfu cha is large: the surface area to volume ratio is smaller and therefore the kettle retains heat better the larger and rounder it is, and the best kettles are of clear glass, which allows you to see the size of the bubbles inside.

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