Twelve pieces a month, in a Liuzhou courtyard
The workshop is a converted shophouse two streets back from the Liu River, in Liuzhou, Guangxi. Its output is intentionally tiny — twelve named pieces a month across the 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.
The shophouse is visited every quarter on our Guangxi route. That route is mostly Yunnan and Fujian leaf, but the glassware is a detour — the bench came up through a Liuzhou pu-erh trader in 2022, and tea.glass has been buying its gaiwans since the second batch.
The fluted form is the workshop’s own signature — an eight-ribbed graphite mould designed for bái háo yín zhēn and other visual whites, where the flutes catch and refract the colour of the soup. The parison is blown into the mould, then the rim is opened 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 by hand. The lot selected in March 2026 is twenty-four pieces across two firings — the second firing ran slightly warmer and the rims pulled a touch finer.