From the bench, Handan
Handan, in southern Hebei, has blown laboratory glass since the 1950s. The family workshop opened in 1987 on the edge of the old industrial district — three benches, one annealing oven, and a quiet specialty in thin-walled teaware once the lab contracts began drying up in the 2010s.
A March 2025 Hebei sourcing trip began as a search for fairness pitchers and ended, as these trips usually do, somewhere else entirely. At the bench, 90ml gaiwans were being pulled at a rate of about forty a day. The rims were flame-polished by hand rather than cut, which is the detail that decided it. A cut rim chips. A flame-polished rim rolls into a soft lip that pours cleanly and doesn’t catch on the upper teeth.
We took the standard 90ml as our house size — large enough for two drinkers, small enough for a single sipper working through a session. Borosilicate (the same glass family as Pyrex) means it survives the rinse-with-boiling-water habit that kills cheaper soda-lime gaiwans within a season.
Each piece carries a small etched mark near the foot — the workshop’s signature, not a brand. For quality control, every shipment gets weighed, lid-seated, and rung for annealing tone before it leaves Kunming. Reject rate has hovered around eight percent, which is high for glass and low for hand work.