Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Purple Clay: Zisha


In the Flagstaff House museum, Hong Kong, Dr. K.S. Lo's collection of these 3 Mings to Qings dynasty pots (above) are bench marks of what Zisha should be.

When Yixing collector addresses Yixing teapot, the first name is usually Zisha. So what is Zisha? I am not going to have a lengthy explanation or zillion of online links to this scientific and Yixing "experts" opinion. However, I am just going to show 2 of mine as an examples, sort of a visual identification in short.


Zi = Purple, Sha = Sand. In the old days, whatever is not purplish hue or sand like quality, it was not considered as Good Zisha. Specially if you see gold/sand sparkle inside, it's even more hard to come by.


Comparing it with the texture and looks of a Qing's Zhuni pot.



Source:
K. S. LO COLLECTION IN THE FLAGSTAFF HOUSE MUSEUM OF TEA WARE

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Toki- Wow - great pots! Where did you get them? And what book is this from? Thanks for sharing.

Matt said...

Toki,

Thanks, as always, for sharing your knowledge on this subject. You and MarshalN (A Tea Addicts Journal) are constantly expanding ones knowledge in the area of Yixing wares.

Peace

Jamus said...

Thank you for sharing this. I agree; beautiful pots, although I'm definitely no expert on the subject. ^__^

jamus~

Salsero said...

Well, as long as everyone else is lining up to say thank you, I guess I might as well add my thanks for this and all your wonderful blog posts!

toki said...

Thank you all for the kind words : )
The more I touch on yixing, the more mysterious they are....

author said...

the zhuni pot is SO beautiful!

- Janine

 
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.