From tea leaf to a bench of one
Michael Zhan spent his first decade in procurement buying leaf, not glass — shēng pǔ’ěr from village processors in Yunnan’s Daxueshan range, dāncōng from Phoenix Mountain growers straddling Fujian and Guangdong. The move to glass came sideways: a Fujian potter, watching him inspect a stack of porcelain sample cups, told him you cannot judge the steam if the cup hides it. The line stuck. When Teamotea began building the tea.glass catalogue, Michael was the obvious person to go looking for vessels rather than leaf.
He found Gao Liuzhou through a Liuzhou-based pu-erh trader in 2022, on one of his regular Guangxi routes. She was already known in a small circle — her fluted gaiwan had a following among Chaozhou dāncōng drinkers who traded her contact by hand — but she had no way to sell past her own paper ledger and a closed circle of regulars. Michael’s role since then has been narrow and specific: he visits her shophouse on Yufeng Road most quarters, looks at whatever she has finished that month, and decides which of the twelve pieces are ready for tea.glass.
There is no negotiating volume upward. Gao works alone — no apprentice, no second gather — and Michael stopped asking for more than one pair of hands can produce years ago. What he checks for instead is consistency within that hard limit: rim thickness against the tolerance she herself states, the fired crane mark at the foot, whether an amber-tinted run holds its tint evenly across twelve pieces rather than fading toward the end of a firing. He rejects on her terms, not his — a chipped flute or an uneven anneal she would set aside if she noticed it first.
His tea-sourcing habits still show. On each visit he tastes through whatever Gao herself is drinking that week, on the theory that a glassblower who brews daily notices things a buyer alone would miss — a rim that catches on the lip, a foot that rocks on an uneven table. Between visits the two of them keep a running WeChat thread, mostly photographs of finished pieces and the occasional note about a firing that ran hot.
Liuzhou, and what Michael actually buys
The lane of workshops near Gao’s shophouse has blown borosilicate glass since the 1980s, mostly for chemical and pharmaceutical ware — the same laboratory lineage that gave Liu Shenyang’s Handan bench its start, six hundred kilometres north. What makes the Liuzhou line specifically Gao’s is scale and hand: no moulds beyond the graphite flute-mold for her signature gaiwan, everything else free-blown and finished solo, capped at twelve named pieces a month.
Michael’s job ends where hers begins. He does not set her prices, does not push for faster turnaround, and does not carry stock beyond what a single visit yields. What reaches tea.glass under the Liuzhou name is simply what Gao made that quarter and was willing to sign.