Brewing Up Teapot History - By: vennasa lee

Teapot design is a folk art in itself, with entire museums dedicated to it. But then there is a lot of ground to cover. All teapots derive from ancient Chinese tea vessels, and some of the best Chinese teapots have always been those from Yixing: red, brown or buff, usually unglazed. These have been around since a couple of centuries BC, but Europe only latched on to them in the 17th century, when trading with the Far East began.

Thousands of Yixing pots were shipped over to Holland and Britain in the first tea cargoes. There is evidence to suggest that they were piled into the ships as much for ballast as for export potential. Once spotted in Europe, however, they were instantly copied. After all, you have to make tea in something.

In Britain, tea was first offered to the public as a drink at Garraway's coffee house in Change Alley, City of London, in 1657. It was first advertised as a wonder drink in newspapers in 1658, and finally found its way down the throat of that dabbler in all things fashionable, Samuel Pepys, in 1660. There was no looking back after that. By 1760 Britain was importing 4.5m tons of tea annually, so much that it threatened to ruin our balance of trade. We got round that by paying the Chinese with Indian-grown opium, which led to all kinds of trouble, but let's not get into that here.

There's a shock in store for those who believe that the Ur-teapot is the British ''Brown Betty'', the satisfyingly simple and cheap, round glazed teapot that has been made, in a range of sizes, since the mid-19th century. Those who revere this design must learn to live with the fact that it is a comparatively recent innovation. The history of teapots, because of the ceremonial nature of tea drinking, is a history of ornamentation. The ''novelty'' teapot is as old as tea drinking itself.

The Chinese loved, and still do, making teapots in any number of bizarre shapes: looking like elephants, clumps of bamboo, fish, shells, birds, dragons, wrestlers, assorted fruits, anything at all rather than a basic shape (although there are occasional exceptions, such as a surprisingly modern, clean-cut rectangular pot made in Yixing in the early 1800s). So it comes as no surprise to find that, once Dutch and English and German potters started making their own pots to cash in on the tea-drinking craze, they, too, added perceived value to their products by embellishing them. The novelty pots of today, in the shape of JCB diggers, TV sets, saucy ladies or four-packs of lager, are absolutely in the traditional bloodline of the teapot. Tasteful modern designs are the aberration.

However, the Chinese never neglected the importance of flavour. Although they also produced dainty porcelain pots and cups (hence ''china'' as a general description), that was for special occasions. For everyday use they favoured the Yixing ware, which was not only unglazed but meant to be unwashed. Tea deposits would build up over time, and fingermarks would turn the reddish pots nearly black round the top, but the tea would taste delicious. Some British tea aficionados still take the view that the pot is best left unwashed.

In fact, most of the tea-time habits we think of as quintessentially British are merely mild variants of Chinese or Japanese ones. Taking tea in the afternoon is one such import. Putting milk and sugar with it (despite beliefs to the contrary) is another. The Chinese never put milk with their green tea, but liked a dash of hot milk with black tea, and were very happy with sugar.

The English potter John Dwight made the first copies of China "redware" pots in Fulham in 1684. His techniques were copied by the Elers brothers from Holland, who set up a factory in Staffordshire. They, in turn, were copied by John Astbury, who pretended to be a simpleton and worked in the Elers factory for 18 months, learning the tricks of the trade. Astbury started producing fantastical glazed pots in the shapes of animals and houses. Josiah Wedgwood, recently set up in business, quickly latched on to the commercial potential of teapots made in the newly invented creamware, and the mass market had arrived. It took the invention of Spode bone china in 1800 to complete the Europeanisation of something the Chinese had been able to do for centuries.

Although coffee drinking arrived at about the same time as tea, coffeepots never attracted the same design attention as teapots. Partly this was because making tea was such a simple thing: there is only one way to do it. In contrast, there are any number of ways of making coffee, and most of the effort went into improving the technology rather than the look of the object. Apart from burnished copper Lyons' Corner Houses tea urns, there is no tea-drinker's equivalent of the seductive machine ethos of espresso machines. Nor was there a coffee-lover's equivalent of the Far Eastern tea ceremony to import. Tea was always more fashionable in Britain: family portraits of the time usually show them taking tea, while Continental equivalents are more likely to show the apparatus of coffee. The Dutch, however, who arguably discovered tea before the English, were even more wildly enthusiastic about it, to the extent that their characteristic canalside summer houses became known as tea houses.

The ''good design'' buffs have long tried to tame the wild excesses of the teapot, with only limited success. Wedgwood's neo-classical designs in black basaltware appealed to an early generation of taste-makers. The Victorian proto-modernist, Christopher Dresser, produced a startlingly contemporary cubist pot, and chaste silversmiths and ceramicists, through to today's producers of modern classics such as Queensbury Hunt, have kept up a good supply of clean designs for modern-minded people. What sells in the auction rooms, however, is more likely to be a brash Clarice Cliff tea set from the 1930s art deco mixed with fauvism or souvenir pots from the heyday of the seaside resort.

Even more than these, the popularity of the ''English cottage'' teapot never wanes. As Edward Bramah, the tea expert and museum-keeper, has remarked: ''There must have been enough of them potted over the years to build a city.'' Square or rectangular pots are inherently unstable to pour because of the way the tea surges from side to side. House-shaped pots, however, have always been around. The Chinese had them, the first English potters did them, thousands are still made. Why? Nobody knows. Me, I've got two sizes of Brown Betty and that's fine for me. A dash of milk and no sugar, please.

Teapot design is a folk art in itself, with entire museums dedicated to it. But then there is a lot of ground to cover. All teapots derive from ancient Chinese tea vessels, and some of the best Chinese teapots have always been those from Yixing: red, brown or buff, usually unglazed. These have been around since a couple of centuries BC, but Europe only latched on to them in the 17th century, when trading with the Far East began.

Please consider handmade yixing teapots and accessories from Yixing, China.