Cardew Club News » 2005 » December

The exhibit catalogue, “The Artful Teapot,” by curator Garth Clark, contains beautiful photographs of all the works in the show, biographies of all the artists and a wealth of interesting tea lore. Here are a few tidbits:

Teapots and taxes: Until the 1500s, the Chinese compressed powdered tea into bricks, which could be used as currency and given to the emperor as a form of tax. When the time came to drink the tea, the powder was whisked into a cup or bowl of hot water. When the tea tax was abolished, about 1500, loose tea leaves came into vogue, and the teapot became a necessary item.

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No little girl took teatime as seriously as Michelle Sommerfeld.

She began collecting tea varieties as a preteen and, by 14, had saved enough Christmas and birthday money to buy her first collectible teapot. She hosted tea parties out of the family house for nearly five years, building her mailing list to 300 people, until her parents asked her to take it outside.

In 2003, Sommerfeld opened Lady Elegant’s Tea Room and Gift Shoppe, where she hews to the English Victorian traditions from a small nest of shops on the southwest corner of Como and Carter avenues in St. Paul.

Charles Stuart Platkin has posted quite a large and informative article on tea and its properties over at wbay.com, so we thought we’d share it here too.

I’m a tea drinker. I enjoy it iced or hot, but lately tea has become more than just a regular beverage. It’s becoming the next “chicken soup.” There are now hundreds of studies done annually on this more than 5,000-year-old drink. The interest in tea as a health beverage is founded on observations that populations that drink a lot of tea seem healthier than populations that don’t.

Written by Jane Rickards and published in The China Post

The smooth white China teapot radiating geometric lines at first seems to have a strangely futuristic feel. Its base does not touch the table and instead is elegantly propped up by two evenly elliptical handles like a landing craft.
But despite its modern lines, its actually part of a collection of designer crockery called “Imperial memories”. The teapot’s two handles nostalgically hark back to the days when servants used two hands to pour tea for the Chinese emperor.

Hundreds of people gathered at a downtown mansion yesterday for a trip back in time — and a proper cup of tea.

The Moreland Manor on Louise Avenue was packed all afternoon for “an enchanted Victorian Christmas tea.”

“It’s all quite extravagant,” host Shari Decter-Hirst said yesterday as she took a break from her tea-pouring duties.

Dressed in period costume, Decter-Hirst opened her home to more than 300 people, who paid $15 each for tickets. The money will go to support the Daly House Museum.

Daly House board member Roberta Kempthorne said the event also helped to educate Brandon residents about their city’s history.

The first teapot Sonny and Gloria Kamm got together was as a wedding gift, and as far as they can remember it was a typical “brown betty” — the traditional glazed pot.

Today, the Los Angeles couple have more than 7,500 teapots and related items, filling shelves and closets and even a condominium they bought for storage and affectionally call “Teapot Central.”

Gloria, a docent at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, describes the collection as sculptures masquerading as teapots.

“It’s a familiar item,” adds Sonny, “so even people who wouldn’t necessarily be interested in art would find something fun and accessible about these pieces.”