From tea master to glassblower
Gao Liuzhou spent his early years as a tea master in Guangdong’s Phoenix Mountains, steeped in the art of dancong oolongs. He understood tea not just as flavour but as movement — the way a tightly twisted leaf opens, the slow swirl of liquor. Yet he could never find a teapot that showed the dance with enough clarity. So he sought out a Hario-trained glassblower in Japan, learning the precision of borosilicate work and the quiet minimalism of Japanese design.
Returning to Chaozhou, he set up a small studio where hand-blowing became his new way to honour tea. His 300ml teapot is his most personal — sized for solitary, meditative sessions with a single cup. Every pot is mouth-blown, annealed in a kiln for thermal resilience, and the strainer is pulled into fine glass threads by hand. The result is a vessel that disappears, letting the leaves speak.
Gao signs the base of each teapot. His work is now used in tasting rooms across Guangdong, where the visual poetry of green, white, and yellow teas is finally seen without obstruction.