From Murano furnaces back to a Guangxi shophouse
Gao Lihua was born in 1986 in Liuzhou, the river city in central Guangxi famous for its limestone karsts and its lacquerware. Tea came first, glass came second. Her grandmother kept a small liù bǎo (六堡) jar in the kitchen — Guangxi’s own dark tea, aged in basket weave — and the morning ritual of warming the leaves in a clear cup was Gao’s earliest visual memory. “I wanted to see the tea,” she has said. “Porcelain hides it. Glass tells the truth.”
She trained in industrial design at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, then in 2009 won a small placement at a Murano studio outside Venice, working under a maestro who specialised in borosilicate scientific ware rather than the decorative work the island is known for. Five years of furnace shifts taught her the discipline that now defines her bench: thin walls, even rims, no decorative flourish that doesn’t serve the brew. She returned to Liuzhou in 2014 and opened a two-room studio in a converted shophouse on Yufeng Road, where the back window looks out onto the Liu River.
Gao works alone. There is no apprentice, no second gather. She fires a small benchtop furnace, gathers her own glass, and finishes every piece — including the foot polish and the signature mark — in a single sitting. Twelve pieces a month is not a marketing figure. It is the hard ceiling of what one pair of hands can do while keeping wall thickness under 1.4 millimetres on a gaiwan lid.
Her signature object is the fluted gaiwan: a 120ml bowl with eight shallow vertical flutes pressed into the wall during the final shaping, which catch light and refract the colour of the soup. She designed it specifically for bái háo yín zhēn (白毫银针) and other visual whites and yellows, where the needle leaves stand upright and the liquor pales slowly from clear to pale apricot. The form has since been copied widely in Jingdezhen and Anxi; her originals are recognisable by the slight asymmetry of the flutes — a hand mark she refuses to correct.
Gao does not consider herself a tea expert. She defers to the Teamotea tasting team — Zhou Xiang on greens and yellows, Chen Hui Yi on whites — for pairing notes and brewing recommendations. “My job is to make a cup that disappears,” she says. “Their job is to tell you what to put in it.” Her secondary line, the 30ml tasting cup set, was designed in collaboration with Fang Ting for side-by-side oolong comparison: six cups, slight variation in rim flare so the same liquor reads differently in each, a small exercise in how vessel shape conditions perception.
She teaches one short course a year at tea.school, on visual brewing and vessel choice — usually full within an hour of opening.
Liuzhou — karst water, river light
Liuzhou sits in central Guangxi where the Liu River bends sharply around limestone karst hills. The city is not a tea-growing region in the famous sense — that honour belongs to Wuzhou in the east, home of liù bǎo chá (六堡茶) — but it sits at the centre of a small ecology of craft that has long served the tea trade: bamboo basket weaving, lacquer, and, more recently, glass.
Gao’s studio uses water drawn from a municipal supply fed by karst aquifers — very soft, very low in iron, which matters because trace iron in the wash water can leave a faint amber cast on borosilicate over years of use. The air, she says, is the other reason she came home. Liuzhou’s humidity sits high year-round, which slows the cooling of the glass at the lehr stage and gives her a longer working window than she ever had in Venice or could find in drier Chinese cities like Jingdezhen.
The shophouse on Yufeng Road is open to walk-ins on Saturday afternoons. The furnace is at the back, the finished pieces are on a single long shelf by the window, and visitors are usually offered a cup of liù bǎo from the grandmother’s jar, now refilled with 2018 basket-aged leaf from a producer in Wuzhou she has worked with since 2016. The river is two minutes’ walk away. Most of her wholesale orders ship out from the small post office on the corner, in boxes she packs herself.