Twelve pieces a month, in a Liuzhou courtyard
Gao Lihua works alone in a converted shophouse two streets back from the Liu River, in Liuzhou, Guangxi. Trained first in industrial design, then for five years at a Murano studio outside Venice, she returned to Liuzhou in 2014 and has been blowing gaiwans under her own name since. Her output is intentionally tiny — twelve named pieces a month across her whole gaiwan and cup line, each logged in a paper ledger with a date, a buyer, and a one-line note about how the piece behaved on the pipe.
Michael Zhan visits her shophouse every quarter on his Guangxi route. He sources mostly Yunnan and Fujian leaf, but the glassware is a personal detour — he found Gao through a Liuzhou pu-erh trader in 2022 and has been buying her gaiwans for tea.glass since the second batch.
The fluted form is her own signature — an eight-ribbed graphite mould she designed for bái háo yín zhēn and other visual whites, where the flutes catch and refract the colour of the soup. She blows the parison into the mould, then opens the rim by hand on the marver. The flutes are functional as well as decorative — they give the lid a positive register so it seats with a small audible click instead of sliding, which matters when your thumb is wet and the bowl is full.
Walls run 1.6 to 2.1mm. Capacity is checked by water-fill against a marked beaker, then etched on the foot in Gao’s handwriting. The lot Michael selected in March 2026 is twenty-four pieces across two firings — the second firing ran slightly warmer and the rims pulled a touch finer.