Vintage View: Yixing Teapots

Considering our gene level connection to tea in this country, collecting teapots would seem a natural extension of a daily obsession.

Tea drinking was first documented in China in the late 8th century, but it’s likely to have been brewed in open pans for thousands of years before the hilariously appropriate book Ch’a Ching was penned.

The pot for tea as we know it wasn’t introduced by the Chinese at all, but developed by the British East India Company in the late 1690s. They wanted their fabulously expensive tea strained for polite society before pouring and drinking, and asked that the Chinese teapots being produced for export be made this way.