The “Yixing” of northern Taiwan. It’s apparently been making pottery for longer than I was initially told.
Very cool place. Yes I saw some cool pots and tea sets. The tea tables here are stupendous, and the pots are pretty neat too. My favourite was just carved out of a rock…
And I went into one store that meandered around amidst someone’s living space where they had everything from crappy stuff to huge carved cinnabar pieces, museum quality chunks of amber with big bees in them and a carving of a tree made from a big rock that had dozens of snail fossils into it, the tree was carved out of the stone leaving the snail fossils out at the end of the branches… it was about three feet tall and the biggest snails were perhaps 4″ across. Holy… Crap… it was amazing.
And I wonder if the mercury in Cinnibar can seep into my skin as I just had to touch everything :-)… I’m still searching for some good specimens of Stibnite, though… And the Chinese words for stones seem to vary.. Or, I think those people spoke Taiwanese.
Most impressive of all was a piece of quartz with hundreds of terminating crystals, many of them five or eight inchers… the whole thing wieghed maybe a third to a half a ton. Absolutely amazing. I may buy it in a few months if it’s still there. It is just. Special. So much museum quality stuff…
I’ll definately head back to YingHe to wheel and deal when I want to spend money on apartment deco.
Dude
Dude…
I know what you are saying… I love that stuff…
I so wanted a carve tea table it’s just I never had any time to handle all the details to have one shipped back here.
Thank you for sharing this experince… as it brings back sooo many cool memories… I can picture… and imagine how fun it must be for you too… looking forward to when you get a camera so you can post some picture of these adventures…
living vicariously
the coolest stuff never makes it to china towns here, New York, Toronto,
only in china
lovin’ your posts!
and remember to save enough to get it all shipped back or will the school pay?!
Cinnabar is used in coloring lacquer as well as in actually making items and utensils. I was worried about the use of cinnabar in tea ceremony items, so I looked it up.
Turns out that, while you can absorb minute traces of mercury through contact with the mineral cinnabar, you would have to drink from a cinnabar cup or eat from cinnabar-lacquered chopsticks an awful lot for it to become measurable in your body. I wouldn’t want to do it every day for a year, but every now and then seems fine.
Oh, and if you eat big predatory fish, you’re probably worse off anyway. Ah well.