From tea leaf to Handan’s furnaces
Sandry Law’s path to curating tea.glass’s Handan collection began with tea, not glass. Based in Kunming, Yunnan, he cut his teeth sourcing pu-erh and green tea from small mountain cooperatives, tasting hundreds of lots a season under the eye of growers who judged a buyer by how carefully he handled the leaf before he ever spoke a price. That habit — quality is demonstrated, not declared — is the one he carries into every glass shipment today.
When Teamotea began building a dedicated line of glass teaware for visual brewing, Sandry took it on as an extension of the same instinct: a shòu méi blooming in a pitcher, the tight spiral of a tiě guān yīn unfurling in a gaiwan, rewards the same attention as a good leaf does. A tip from a tea trader he’d known for years led him north, to Handan, a city in southern Hebei with a storied — if under-the-radar — glassmaking tradition built on decades of laboratory-ware contracts rather than tea. There he met Liu Shenyang, third-generation head of the family bench his grandfather Liu Fuqing opened in 1987. Sandry spent three days at the workshop on that first visit, handling raw tubes of borosilicate and sketching spout angles with Liu. Neither of them speaks much of the other’s dialect fluently; the exacting-standards part of the conversation needed no translation.
Sandry has returned to Handan roughly twice a year since — once to review the season’s core production, once to test prototypes for new shapes with Liu. He checks each batch personally: rim finish under raking light, lid seat, a thermal-shock pass from ice water to near-boiling. Reject rate across the Handan line has settled around eight percent, which Sandry considers high for glass and low for entirely hand-blown work. Only pieces that clear his check carry the small Handan mark stamped near the foot.
What keeps him going back, beyond the glass itself, is the working relationship with Liu Shenyang — built on the kind of trust that takes years of showing up rather than a purchase order. Liu now flags a bubble or a rim flaw before Sandry spots it himself, which Sandry takes as the real measure of five years of visits. He still begins most mornings with a session in a 90ml Handan gaiwan — half to enjoy the tea, half to check that the glass is still doing its job.
Hebei’s Handan — a legacy of blown clarity
Handan sits on the dry edge of the North China Plain, an industrial city — steel, ceramics, coal — with no tea-growing reputation of its own. Its glassmaking arrived in the twentieth century as a service trade to chemical and pharmaceutical works, which is why Liu Shenyang’s bench works exclusively in borosilicate rather than the soda-lime glass common in cheaper teaware.
Liu Fuqing opened the shop in 1987, supplying laboratory beakers to a nearby chemical institute. His son took the bench over in the early 2000s and pivoted toward lighting fixtures, drifting away from tea entirely — it was Shenyang, the third generation, who brought tea-specific forms back to the furnace after a Chaozhou visitor asked him for a flared, knife-edge gaiwan rim in 2014. The workshop today runs on one gas furnace, one glory hole, two annealing ovens and a small lathe, employing Liu Shenyang’s mother, his cousin and two apprentices alongside him. What the family is known for, among the small circle of collectors who have found them, is the rim: fire-polished by hand rather than cut and ground, which warms faster in the palm and resists chipping when a lid is set down quickly.
Sandry’s contribution has been narrow and consistent — visiting on a schedule the family can plan around, paying promptly, and asking Liu Shenyang’s opinion before his own on anything that touches the brewing side of a design. He considers that restraint the reason the Handan line still feels like one bench’s work rather than a catalogue assembled from many.