The Liuzhou amber bench
In a narrow lane off the Liujiang river, Gao Lihua runs her shophouse on Yufeng Road alone. She’s one of the last glassblowers in Liuzhou who insists on laboratory-grade borosilicate — the kind that can handle a sudden flood of boiling water without a crack. Michael Zhan brought her the idea for an amber run after a retired chemist mentioned her beakers still turned up in a Liuzhou lab, and after a few visits and rounds of tea, Gao agreed to work a tinted variant into her regular gaiwan runs.
The amber tint comes from a pinch of iron oxide mixed into the melt: no lead, no cadmium, just a whisper of mineral warmth. Gao blows each gaiwan into her usual two-part wooden mould, then fire-polishes the lip by hand. The result is a rim so thin it almost disappears against the lower lip. She stamps the base with her small fired crane mark before cooling the glass slowly.
Michael selected this tint after a long afternoon testing heat tolerance, lip comfort, and how the amber performed against different liquors. Because it takes longer at the bench than her clear gaiwans, the amber run makes up only a handful of her twelve pieces in any given month — most of what she blows stays clear. This is quiet, functional artistry — a tool that disappears into the tea, except for that gentle amber note reminding you where it came from.