It’s been a few years since we last wrote about the Dayuling 100K Tea Gardens, and a few readers have asked us about the status of the gardens – a ...

Inge Nielsen is a name that will need little introduction for many tea lovers. A Danish potter working in Brussels, Inge studied pottery in Taipei. She makes a variety of stoneware vessels, but has become known primarily for her teaware - beautiful and functional pieces sized perfectly for Chinese tea sessions.

We have long been admirers of her art and were very happy to be able to showcase her work here at Mud&Leaves. We were also very interested in her process, and Inge was kind enough to discuss it with us.

With the advent of gas and electric kilns, wood kilns, with their more labour and resource intensive requirements, were increasingly seen as impractical and obsolete. By the 1970s and 1980s gas and electric kilns replaced wood kilns in the industry in Nixing. While gas and electric kilns still dominate the industry, there has been a recent rekindling of interest in the traditional wood firing process. The kiln described below is the one used to fire our wood fired Nixing teapots and is one of less than a handful of large wood kilns still operating in Nixing today.