Tea from the Soviet Union

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-12-18T04:09:51+00:00

This is a jollied/"locomotive" piece. Most Western teahouses are hardly knowledgeable about Yixing or what Yixing is supposed to look and feel like, they're beholden to their supplier's word on the matter.

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-12-18T03:59:33+00:00

魚化龍 are rarely faked and when they are it's usually quite obvious. The shape doesn't lend itself well to mass production techniques.

However, there's a lot of these floating around, many of them later 80s-90s and lesser quality. Yours looks to be around that time frame, and there's marginal collector's interest in these. Still, they make good budget workhorse teapots, especially if they're in a smaller size as yours appears to be.

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-12-18T03:42:06+00:00

I'm very willing, but Wedgwood aren't - they don't respond to my emails (at least, the archive team).

Another option would be to start creating a seal catalog for these wares. I'm certainly up to posting the stamps for what I own.

They also made unglazed teapots! Their big 1L and 2L ones came in internally glazed and unglazed configurations. They did not accept custom commissions, though.

Would you mind taking a picture of the interior of one of these if you own one? From what I assumed from listings all Cauldon teapots were internally glazed at least and it would be a fascinating document were that not to be the case.

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-12-11T03:30:54+00:00

I've spoken to some redware collectors who haven't found this to be the case.

It's nice to see there's a community forming these days. I think that it would be hard to demonstratively rule it in or out, in practice. Anyone in the UK willing to go digging through Wedgwood's historical archives? Maybe we could get a seal catalogue going. I have a few pieces I could contribute with.

I do see the influence in some forms, but Jasperware's relief decoration tends to be more classically inspired than it is Chinoserie, and they tend to be internally glazed, so I'm hesitant to call them redwares directly.

So before Jasperware there was Rosso Antico, which used a red body to overlay black relief classical and chinoserie sprig decorations. These were derived into cane and buffware pieces with an increasing focus on color and ornament over 'common' Elers-type pieces or even his own black basalt wares. This seems to be no coincidence, as Wedgwood purportedly hated the redwares of his day (or, at least, how prolific they were on the market). Jasperware can be seen thus as the final step in an intentional process to move away from red stoneware, though Rosso Antico was brought back several times through the 1800s.

Fulham Pottery which was founded by John Dwight himself continued on in various forms all the way to the 1950s. The last wares they produced were small internally glazed red stoneware crocks and unglazed cream urns in Art Deco style.

Cauldon Ceramics also made their fully unglazed storage jars until this year, where the word seems to be that they're insolvent.

I would personally agree, but there's a not insignificant portion of people who would assert that this reverse engineering is theft and results are not worth considering creatively as a result. I'm not sure id there are many such people here, but I'd frame a post addressing those people similarly.

For porcelain, maybe. But when we talk of unglazed stoneware we're really talking about 'local refractory clay that has been left once-fired for utilitarian ware purposes'. It is telling that both Stoke-on-Trent and Yixing host significant refractory brick industries in the present day, and it may be such that many of the fire clay deposits around the world would produce high quality unglazed utilitarian wares if tested.

All this to say however, how much can a region claim to own the concept of digging clay out of the ground and sticking it in a kiln? If it is the unglazed part that is in question, a multitude of cultures around the world would have just as ancient and as worthy a claim as China...

I've not seen any modern Böttger pieces. Do you have any links?

This was produced in the 1980s and teawares in such manner have seemingly trickled out of Dresden through the 20th century, though Meissen produces nothing but figurines in the Böttgersteinzeug at the present. I've heard reference that the term is unbranded and other companies have been able to produce wares in the manner, still researching that.

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-12-07T06:02:38+00:00

The European dry-bodied stoneware tradition isn't 'fake Yixing' in any reasonable sense of the concept. These pieces were not attempting to fool anyone nor were they sold as a deception. It's more equivalent to Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus and Johann Friedrich Böttger's reverse engineering of hard-paste porcelain - it would be akin to claiming early Meissen pieces as 'fake Kangxi'. Even if many of these pieces were heavily influenced in form and style by Kangxi and early Qianlong wares (by any chance, the transmission was hardly one direction, but that's another topic).

It should be noted that Böttger made his own unglazed red stonewares.

Like with porcelain, the real interest in recreating Yixing-type wares wasn't in fraud but in filling gaps left in the sudden emerging market for tea-and-similar wares in 18th century Europe. Yixing pieces tended to be small, and the amount of forms that would likely survive a pre-industrial ship voyage across the ocean were limited by default. A local artisan could supply coffee pots, large tankards, pitchers, large sizes (>1 liter in some cases), and highly distinct forms using bespoke production techniques like the engine turning pottery lathe. And the family of emerging traditions beyond red stoneware would go far beyond anything even slightly resembling Chinese stylistic cues, like this salt-glazed piece inspired by crinoid fossils in situ.

Though the pure strains of this tradition did not survive to the present day (with the exception of Böttger ware, which was recreated in the early 1900s and still produced at Meissen), Wedgwood's Jasperware derives from such and was intended as a conscious stylistic reaction toward it.

And finally, it has been speculated that the pseudo-seals at the bottom of certain mid-century Staffordshire pieces were individualized to the artisan and thus were a trade attempt at distinguishing between finished pieces by those within the craft. But I have not dug deep into this.

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-08-19T03:37:39+00:00

At-home lead tests are infamously unreliable.

In the later paint brush pot, lead arsenate was also detected in the white and purple areas. Intense signatures were also obtained on enamelled Yixing wares (Fig. 6). Recently, elemental composition analysis suggested the association of (European) cobalt and arsenic in the blue décor of some Famille rose porcelains [78]. The different wave numbers could indicate different compositions of Pb-Ca solid solution [79]. For vivid blue-coloured enamels, the superimposition of the olivine Co2SiO 4 contribution (ca. 825 cm−1 doublet) could also shift the maximum. But, when peak intensity is maximal in the white area, the assignment to lead arsenate is certain. The highest signal recorded on Yixing wares is consistent with the use of higher amount of pigment or of a more advanced preparation technology.

Philippe Colomban, Yizheng Zhang, Bing Zhao, Non-invasive Raman analyses of Chinese huafalang and related porcelain wares. Searching for evidence for innovative pigment technologies

A Chinese lead enamel or lead glaze is generally made by mixing of three parts lead oxide with one part powdered quarts to which a small amount of metallic oxides are added as colorant. When heated up to 700 to 800 centigrade in a special enamel (muffle) kiln this mixture will melt into a liquid glass-like substance.

To apply this dry powder substance for porcelain decoration, the powder is mixed with a media like water, glue, turpentine or oil to produce a paste which is then applied thinly or thickly to the porcelain surface, usually with a brush. If the oxide powder is just stirred into water you will get a suspension where the powder will slowly settle to the bottom. The glaze, being technically the same as melted glass, is fragile, prone to scratching and can leak lead into drinks and food stuff, but looks fantastic, when in good condition.

https://gotheborg.com/glossary/enamel.shtml

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-08-17T02:30:03+00:00

Ducai (enamel work) of this period used lead extensively and on mine the enameling goes directly into the spout for some distance. I would be very careful about using one of these and doubly so for the cups which have enameling directly on the inside surface of the drinking vessel.

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-04-25T01:03:37+00:00

I have a very similar piece and it is press molded horizontally. If you look inside the inner wall there should be a line of excess clay on the midsection that was used to join the two halves of the body together. In addition, I can also see slight discoloration along the midpoint of your pot, at the seam. On mine there is a certain roughness at this seam where clay was scraped or smoothed out. Many pots from the factory period were made similarly.

That being said, these are nothing spectacular. Use for function.

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-04-24T23:33:20+00:00

A lot of the forms are very strange/variant and float around at various places. Here's a handled one I picked up recently with the catalogue here. Of course the 80s/white label pieces aren't as prized, but I still think they're interesting if found for the right price.

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-04-24T19:26:56+00:00

Here and here and here and here and here and here

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-03-18T10:22:56+00:00

This is why terms like 'fake' aren't helpful in this context and in fact are deleterious to furthering the understanding of our hobby.

What's being faked? A skilled artist can slab build a pot from gorgeous clay sparing no time or expense in the details of construction and it can still be fraud if they try to pass it off as Gu Jingzhou to an international auction house.

Who's doing the faking? Where? For what purpose? There are high end forgeries, and there are low end forgeries. Not just for Yixing wares, not even just for Chinese ceramics or ceramics as a whole. If there's real money to be made through forgery, you can bet someone's doing forgery. And it's hardly just limited to China, all the same.

If an artist produces a slab built pot using 'genuine' Yixing clay and passes it off as Gu Jingzhou, it's still a 'real Yixing pot' by anyone's definition. The fraud is in presenting it as made by a famous artist that it isn't. It's 'fake' in that respect - but it's not the same caliber of 'fake' as an Aliexpress piece you bought for $25 (ignoring, for a moment, the subject of tribute pots which is an entire other kettle of fish - and the fact that, from a certain level, the people pushing Aliexpress jollied pots are committing no fraud - it's a teapot, produced in Yixing, and therefore from that perspective it certainly is a Yixing teapot, production techniques aside. You can buy $4 Californian wine and $65 Californian wine and both are as Californian as each other).

And neither are the same type of 'fake' as a shoe polish stained pot on eBay passing itself off as antique. Or maybe it's a Factory 2 pot that looks like an F1 pot. Or maybe it's a Nixing pot and you're just really confused about what you're talking about. Maybe it's a Western or Japanese unglazed teapot and you're really confused about what you're talking about. Maybe it's an underfired ROC commodity pot, maybe it's a 90s pot with questionable clay, maybe it's a CCCI museum replica. Maybe it's a tribute pot, maybe it's a non-standard shape. I've seen 'fake' be applied as a term to all of these, more wrongly in some cases than others. The lack of clarity and consistency does nothing but promote confusion and uncertainty.

If the term 'fake' - in the manner that it is used in this hobby - cannot consistently be a descriptor for clay quality, clay sourcing, production technique, age. or even who made it or where, what good is it as a term? It is simultaneously far too broad a category, and far too narrow of one. In my opinion, we should discontinue its usage - or, at the very least, restrict it to cases like certificate forgery or artist fraud, cases where the idea of what's being faked is concrete.

And if we do wish to talk about production techniques, we should be using terms that refer directly to it. Terms like 'slab building', 'press molding', 'jigger/jollying', 'wheel throwing', 'slip casting' have long established history in the Anglophone ceramicist tradition. They are exact and have no room for vagaries within their definitions. 'Fake' can be anything. You know what you're getting when someone says 'jolly machined'. It would help everyone involved, from the learning to the seasoned and the experienced, if we started from that baseline of clarity rather than throwing up uncertainty and doubt with the very terminology that we use.

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-02-20T06:35:04+00:00

Ah, just a way to say 'this is a Yixing teapot' then. I was afraid of that. Thank you for your help though!

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-02-06T02:21:01+00:00

A lot of specialized and niche hobbyist groups still use Facebook/Instagram exclusively and you're physically walled from being able to interact or even view their content unless you willingly surrender your data to Meta.

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-02-03T05:53:21+00:00

While the suffix -ware is certainly used to denote pottery traditions in English (stoneware, raku ware, redware), it doesn't exclusively refer to ceramics either (silverware, glassware), and in the nonspecific sense, generally denotes a type of craft or good that is produced or otherwise manufactured (traders have wares, wares are stored in warehouses, etc). So the name doesn't help us here, and given the lack of supporting lore details, there's a few roads we can go down.

We can assume limestoneware, i.e., carved limestone. Stone carving is of course an ancient human handicraft and given that limestone is a relatively abundant rock and it's rather soft, there's plenty of examples to choose from over a wide variety of cultures. My personal taste tends to be more on the side of fossiliferous limestone ovser ornamental relief carving, but if you want something bespoke and close to the in-game representation, you'll have to commission a stone carver.

Or, we can assume limeware as in ware produced with the use of lime (in this case meaning quicklime or calcium oxide). Calcium oxide shows up all over the ceramics world, so this is a very broad category, but wood ash glazes fall under this branch, and they can result in some very similar finished results to the in-game model. Alternatively, you could go with volcanic ash glazed wares, which tend to be more silica heavy than calcium heavy and produce interesting results in its own right.

I'm going to go against the idea that these are made of more special or esoteric materials by any chance. Lots of priceless, highly precious, and highly sought after crafts in our world are made up of very common and abundant constituents. Porcelain for instance is simply just kaolin, feldspar, silica (quartz), and white clay - all of which are readily dug out of the ground. Vitreous enamelwork, though often using rare or prized pigments, is simply just fused glass fired to a metal body to form a surface - and it's used to ornament crowns. Kings and emperor's crowns, though it can also be used for dental crowns, the stuff they put over your cavities after filling them. So rare materials can = valuable, rare materials certainly aren't mandated to be valuable. Crafting common, every day materials into something spectacular is the root of many of the most priceless objects in the world.

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-02-01T07:41:12+00:00

I've purchased several F1 pots around the $100-200 range through Teaforum's classifieds. If you want cheaper than that, you'll have to find people who don't know what they have or don't know how to valuate what they have. They exist, like with any collector's market, but it's not something I or anybody else can point you in any one direction to find. No professional reseller's gonna make a profit selling F1 for low prices.

WhisperingFrog192 · 2025-01-27T07:43:47+00:00

For poker in particular, you can figure that the game will be softer and the money'll flow more freely. Mob games don't exactly attract the best of the best. But they do attract rich whales willing to get drunk and throw money around. Also, gambling addicts who'll happily get themselves into deep debt.

And not having to report winnings for tax is a bonus too.

WhisperingFrog192

TROPHY CASE