Cai Chunying works on a teapot in her studio in Shanghai recently.

Holding a pot base with her left arm and a bamboo knife in her right, scribbling,shaving and spinning without a second's hesitation, 39-year-old Cai Chunying is as adept atmaking ceramic teapots as any other craftsman or craftswoman in China.

But what differentiates Cai from her peers and makes her work way more valuable is that sheworks without her left hand.

Cai used to be a textile worker in Yixing, a small city known as the hometown of ceramic teapotsin Jiangsu province. Unfortunately, she lost her left hand while working in a mill at the age of 20.Her heart sank after the accident, because all of a sudden she couldn't work as a normalperson. And her husband's separation made her life even more miserable.

Several weeks ago an Australia customer bought Wang Hongjuan’s yixing teapot from my web shop, cause of china festival – “Mid Autumn”, the delivery taken two weeks, when he finally get the teapot he was delight with the workmanship at first, but terrible things happened when he smelled that pots, here is the excerpt from one of his mail:

It is a shame because those pots don't even contain real Yixing clay. That's how bad they are. I sanded both pots well and also boiled them for 6 hours and they still smelled as if a chemical was added to the making process. I have broken and disposed of the pots because they are a health hazard.

When I receive this mail it was a big surprise, when I tested other wang hongjuan’s teapot, some recently replenished her pots also had strange smelling indeed. I had refunded two teapots of his payment at once, and he sent a picture of fragments of these two teapots the next day.

I have mail all my customers who purchased wang hongjuang’s teapots. Anyone find problems with their pots can broken it and mail the photo to me, then I will make the full refund of it.

I will make the follow promise to my customer, although this is basic.

I offer a 7 days return and refund polices if you are not completely satisfy with your order.

Also I promise these things won’t happen again in my web shop

This blog will put in front of my web shop for one week, as a punishment for my own careless.

- Felix Song

Tea-making treasures catch the fancy of connoisseurs as record prices brew up interest

Most teapots used in the West are big and bright and have been styled to cater for European tea-drinkers for hundreds of years. But in China, tea experts say the best brews are made in smaller pots made from special clay. And for about 500 years handmade zisha teapots have been considered the best of the best. They have been indispensable to true tea connoisseurs who seek the subtle nuances of flavor and aroma tenderly expressed by each leaf.

These brown-colored teapots can also be extremely valuable. Last year a zisha pot made by master Gu Jingzhou sold for 12.32 million yuan (1.3 million euros) at the China Guardian Spring Auction.

In history, qing hui ni clay is the impurity yixing clay, infact this kind of mine is not even exist, we call it qing hui ni clay only because this clay's color is graphite, qing hui is a color which means graphite. In modern times, this clay is made by adding other clay to duan ni clay, only to reach the color effect, not affect health.

Di cao qing clay is a type of yixing clay, the block of di cao qing clay minerals scatter with light green spot on the surface, these green color spot are extensive and evenly distributed. The di cao qing raw clay appears purplish, fine and pure. Clay appears purplish after burned, the real color depends on the specific composition of the mineral aggregate and the firing temperature.