A procurement journey from Yunnan mist to glass furnaces
Sandry Law’s path to becoming the curator of tea.glass’s Handan collection began not with glass, but with tea. Based in Kunming, Yunnan, he cut his teeth sourcing pu-erh and green teas from small mountain cooperatives, learning firsthand how transparency in origin translates into transparency in the cup. Those early years — spent tasting hundreds of lots under the watchful eyes of grizzled farmers — imprinted a lesson he carries into every glass ship sheet: quality isn’t declared, it’s demonstrated.
When Teamotea began expanding its constellation of tea brands, Sandry saw a gap no one else was filling — a dedicated, carefully curated line of glass teaware designed specifically for visual brewing. Shou mei blooming in a pitcher, the tight spiral of a Tieguanyin unfurling in a gaiwan, the slow, honeyed pour from a fair cup: he knew these moments demanded glass that was not only functional but true. A cloudy vessel was a missed story.
A tip from a veteran tea trader led him to Handan, a city in southern Hebei province with a storied—if under-the-radar—glassmaking tradition. There, in a narrow workshop humming with the sound of gas torches, he met Liu Shenyang, the third-generation head of a family bench that had been blowing laboratory-grade glass for decades. Sandry spent three days watching, handling raw tubes of borosilicate, sketching gentle spout angles and flared rims with Liu. They realized they spoke the same language: not Mandarin, but the language of exacting standards.
Since that first visit, Sandry has returned to Handan twice a year — once in late spring to approve the year’s core production runs, and again in autumn to test prototypes for new shapes. He inspects every batch personally: a 500 lux light panel checks clarity, a digital caliper measures wall thickness variance to within 0.2 mm, and a series of thermal shock tests (ice water to boiling) weed out any vessels that lack the Shenyang family’s reputed resilience. Only then do they earn the small Handan mark stamped on the base.
What keeps Sandry going back, besides the glass, is the partnership he’s built with Liu Shenyang — a collaboration based on shared pride, not just purchase orders. “Liu-jia remembers the first pitcher I rejected,” Sandry says with a wry smile. “Now he’s the one who points out a tiny bubble before I even see it.” That level of trust, built over five years of frank conversations and countless cups of tea shared in the workshop’s break room, is the real reason the Handan line feels cohesive — a family of vessels, not a catalog of SKUs.
Today, Sandry Law’s work straddles procurement and quality control for multiple Teamotea sites, but his fingerprint is deepest on tea.glass. He still begins each day with a gongfu session using a 90 ml Handan gaiwan — half to enjoy the tea, half to make sure the glass is still doing its job.
Hebei’s Handan — a legacy of blown clarity
Handan doesn’t appear on many tea maps. Yet tucked among its low-rise industrial streets is a workshop where molten glass has been shaped into precision vessels for three generations — first for laboratories, now increasingly for tea. The Shenyang family’s bench is one of a handful in the region that specialises in high-grade borosilicate, prized for its heat resistance and optical purity.
Liu Shenyang’s grandfather started the furnace in the 1960s, supplying flasks and tubing to research institutes. When the second generation took over, they added drinking glasses, but it wasn’t until Liu-jia inherited the bench that tea-specific wares became the focus. His gaiwans are hand-blown without moulds, each one slightly unique in curve; his fairness pitchers are annealed twice to eliminate micro-stresses that could lead to cracking during rapid temperature changes. Sandry Law’s periodic visits have nudged the line toward even finer tolerances — the spout of the 200 ml gongdaobei was re-angled by just 3°, based on Sandry’s observations of how liquid clings during slow pours, making it cleaner for gongfu service.
The surrounding terrain supplies more than raw silica; local artisans have long drawn from Handan’s coal reserves to fuel consistent furnace temperatures, a factor that gives the glass its remarkable clarity. Few customers realise that the pristine transparency of their 50 ml tasting cup owes as much to Handan’s geology as to the Shenyang family’s skill — but Sandry Law thinks about it every time he holds a batch up to the light.
