From Liu Shenyang’s bench, Handan
Handan, in southern Hebei, has blown laboratory glass since the 1950s. The Liu 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.
Sandry Law visited in March 2025 on a Hebei sourcing trip that began as a search for fairness pitchers and ended, as these trips usually do, somewhere else entirely. Liu Shenyang — the founder’s son, now running the bench — was pulling 90ml gaiwans 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 — Liu’s workshop signature, not a brand. Quality control is Sandry’s: 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.