In the following lines, we tell the story of the artisans who produce all the Yixing teapots you find on our website, in our tea room, and in our Yunnan studio. We have spoken about them many times, and many of you have met them personally during our travels. Here, we explain their identities, history, and way of working, hoping to add meaningful depth to the objects that accompany you in your passion for tea leaves.
Between 2010 and 2013, Vivian realised that every teacher, even within the great academies, held their own convictions. She therefore decided to go directly to the source of every leaf and every clay, to build her own knowledge.
Our relationship with Yuan Weixin and his wife Lian Meiping began in 2011, three years before Eastern Leaves was founded in 2014.
Yixing craft, in those years of rapid growth, was particularly difficult to approach for anyone who was not a specialised professional in the district. The only accessible source of information was the old municipal museum, and the available books were few and still lacked authority.
Those were the years when market valuations in the district were close to their peak, and artisans - traditionally far more engaged in artistic practice than in divulgation - were rarely open to dialogue, especially with those who were not clearly wealthy potential clients.
unsure how to deal with a stranger asking so many questions, he brought Vivian to his wife, Lian Meiping. At that time, she was extremely busy producing top-level teapots for well-known figures, such as Jackie Chan, and Yuan Weixin often acted as a filter for her. Fortunately, Vivian was accepted, and from that moment a serious relationship began, rooted in knowledge and research, strengthened by an instinctive personal bond that has become inseparable over time.
For their studio, we were a completely unprofitable business contact for many years. In 2014, we purchased Eastern Leaves’ first plot of land and devoted all our attention to the growth of our trees and the production of our teas, studying with dozens of other cultivators and pu’er professionals.
We visited Yixing every year, but always in a personal capacity. For a long time, the first version of our website listed only six references—our six teas—and it took us years before we could literally afford any other purchases; moreover, before introducing our clients to this precious world, we needed to experience these pieces deeply ourselves, comparing them with those made by different artists, in order to deepen our own knowledge of the materials and thus guarantee it for our clients.
For a long time, the first version of our website listed only six references—our six teas—and it took us years before we could literally afford purchases,
Those were the years of building knowledge. Without that apprenticeship, nothing else would ever have been possible.
Had we not built this disinterested relationship with Yuan Weixin and Lian Meiping, we would never have been able to interpret their answers fully, nor to speak openly about the history of the district, the mines, and the careers of both the old masters and the emerging ones - people whose lives and families they had known since childhood, when they played in the courtyards and villages scattered across the surrounding hills.
Without them, we could have carried out field research, we could have convinced ourselves with numbers and data, but we would never have grasped the essence of the district, nor understood its evolution.
Together with them, we compared the chemical composition percentages found in academic papers for the various clays, and we listened to stories of real people who worked in the mines, or who assisted the Seven Great Masters; of those who smuggled clay after the mines had already closed, and of others who sold teapots they had never made; of children who abandoned the craft and others who returned to it; of auctions, merchants, certificates and jade seals, and then of buyers, dreams and money, of travels, houses, loves, and entire worlds.
Like every couple committed to their own project, both of us have gone through periods of decline and excitement, of illness and depression, followed by renewed motivation towards new paths. In many of those moments, we recognised ourselves in them, understood one another, and watched each other find new directions.
When we decided to include some Yixing teapots in our range, we immediately purchased theirs. At the same time, those of you who have followed us for longer know that we have never stopped exploring. On the contrary, Yuan Weixin himself has always introduced us to other artists, from whom we purchased works alongside others whose whose excellent and distinctive techniques we came to trust over time.
Over all these years, there have been periods when one of the two, for various reasons, was unable to produce.
Yet, from this account it is clear how we have always returned to their worktable - to study, and to acquire pieces for our service and for our guests and clients.
After many years in this work, we have understood how important this relationship is. It is privileged access to the heart of artisanal technique and the best possible foundation on which to build knowledge, sustained by empathy and mutual understanding.
Lian Meiping
She was born in the mid-1970s, when China was beginning its transition from the Mao era to the time of Deng Xiaoping’s great reforms. In post-1949 Yixing, there was the era of the “Great Seven”: a group of masters who kept the art alive, codified it, and nurtured new, deserving students capable of carrying the artisanal tradition forward—preserving classical forms and, after thousands of repetitions, innovating by introducing new shapes and processes.
Often referred to as the Seven Elders of Zisha, they were formally appointed in 1956 by the Jiangsu Provincial People’s Government as master instructors of Yixing purple clay. The group included Gu Jingzhou, Ren Ganting, Pei Shimin, Wu Yungen, Wang Yinchun, Zhu Kexin, and Jiang Rong. At a moment when the tradition was at risk, they ensured its survival by codifying techniques and opening knowledge that had long been confined to family lineages. Through their involvement in the Shushan Pottery Production Cooperative and a structured apprenticeship system, they trained a new generation of artisans and laid the foundations of modern Zisha practice—transforming a fragile, inherited craft into a shared and enduring cultural legacy.
This was a time when the city’s economy revolved around the mines, from which thousands of tonnes were extracted annually; from Mine No. 4 alone, total extraction reached tens of thousands of tonnes over the decades, while only a fraction consisted of specific high-grade clays such as Benshan Lüni. There were artisanal schools clustered around the masters, and the mines employed many others, including Lian Meiping’s father, who was part of a blasting team, a very dangerous job.
The private market was almost non-existent and only began to grow in the 1980s, together with China itself. Traditional culture was reborn - an intrinsic part of a people and a place - and the resources to sustain an elite production finally emerged.
As the generation of the Seven Masters began to withdraw in the 1980s for reasons of age, the first great contemporary masters took their place, among them Lü Yaochen. He would later be recognised with a unique, separate status: someone who innovated his district by elevating it, entering fully into contemporary art, conceptualising the object to which he devoted his life, and transcending previous definitions.
At the age of seventeen, Lian Meiping lost her father in a mining accident, inside a Yixing clay mine. Her family lived close by the entrance of Mine n.4, and collected pieces of clay that fell from the mine carts as they passed the gates, in addition to her father's activity as a miner.
At this point, Lü Yaochen becomes part of our story: years earlier his first son married Lian Meiping's youngest aunt, making her his granddaughter-in-law. Since then, he grew closer and closer to her family, purchasing raw ores and especially samples from different mines, of great importance for his job.
The great master saw her growing up, and when the tragedy happened, he further encouraged her talent taking her as his disciple, a very rare position reserved for his family members.
From that point on, she devoted herself entirely to the study of ceramics, following the most classical and demanding path: daytime studies at a vocational school, and nights spent producing thousands upon thousands of spouts, handles, lids, and every detail of teapots, so that the hands could work autonomously and the mind could become one with the clay.
Besides the traditional techniques and shapes of Yixing pots, and the thousands and thousands of exercises to master each detail of the craft, Lü Yaochen encouraged her most natural talent, which bloomed into floral and bamboo-shaped decorations, letting traditional shapes and pots thrive with her creativity and skills.
Yuan Weixin
He was born one year before Lian Meiping in Hufu 湖㳇, a village on the first western hills a few kilometres from Yixing, surrounded by dense bamboo forests that would later provide the backdrop for many Wuxia 武侠 films of the 1990s and 2000s and - not least - the hometown of the famous tea pot
At the time, these were rural villages surrounding the wealthiest mining city, and for centuries—alongside bamboo timber - they had supplied it with some of the finest flavours, nourishing the legend of the local cuisine.
It took us more than few years that his home as a child was few dozen of meters far from the former Jinsha Temple 金沙寺 (the site is now an overgrown ruin), which is where the temple attendant Gong Chun lived, learning pottery from the monks and becoming know from the generations to come as the first Yixing master.
His birthplace is thus directly connected to Jinsha Temple. He fully hand-makes Gong Chun–style teapots according to his own understanding and feeling for Gong Chun’s work. In recent years, he has developed a particular fondness for small teapots, and his pieces have gradually become more compact in scale.
From an early age, Yuan Weixin developed a passion for writing and the study of the classics, and at just eighteen he moved to the city to become a calligrapher and engraver on teapots.
According to a pot’s shape and the colour of the clay, he carves different styles of calligraphy - running, cursive, clerical, seal, and regular script - adapting each inscription to the vessel. Alongside calligraphy, he engraves simple motifs such as boats, orchids, plum blossoms, bamboo, chrysanthemums, and cats.
Over the years, he became known for his drawing and carving on teapots, and other artisans often asked him to engrave name seals for their work.
His studio hosted many students of calligraphy, which has always remained his primary passion. In recent years, after the upheavals of the sector and his own personal challenges, he has devoted himself mainly to engraving his favourite poems, those he writes himself, and the Buddhist Heart Sutra: a miniature work of great difficulty, which he knows he will only be able to continue for as long as his eyesight allows.
In his early twenties, he met Lian Meiping. She brought him her teapots to engrave, and the rest is easy to imagine. A love was born, and a life together began.
Yuan Weixin himself later began studying ceramics, assisted by his wife, eventually reaching the level of National Senior-Master 高级工艺美术师 (国家).
The studio
Over the years, their personal lives have grown alongside the district and the country. Yixing represents a form of craftsmanship deeply bound to the heart of Chinese tea culture, and now that the economic system can sustain both, there has been a new flowering of opportunities for anyone willing to devote themselves rigorously to manufacture.
Lian Meiping, in particular, guided by her grandfather in law Lü Yaochen, gained recognition early and, while still under thirty, became highly sought after, with rapidly rising valuations. She produces every piece personally, using clay excavated by her father and stored in her grandfather’s warehouses, while Yuan Weixin engraves her teapots.
Alongside his work as a calligrapher, Yuan Weixin steadily refined his own ceramic production, following a more essential and minimalist path.
Beyond its founders, one of the studio’s greatest assets is the clay excavated by Lian Meiping’s family in the 1980s and 1990s - material that became especially valuable after the early 2000s, when mining activity slowed and eventually ceased.
They are particularly remembered in the district for their holdings of Benshan Lüni from Mine No. 4 of Huanglongshan. Historically, several thousand tons of this clay were extracted, but the vast majority was already consumed by the mid-1990s.
The Benshan Lüni preserved within the family comes from late-1990s production. In 2015, they secured approximately 1.5 tons of the same material; having used only a small portion, it has since become a rare and scarcely available resource.
Alongside this, they still retain several hundred jin (around 300 kg) of Mine No. 4 Benshan Lüni left unused by Lian Meiping’s father before his passing in the 1990s - material now valued less for production than as an archival and reference sample.
Together, these holdings provide an unusually strong guarantee of provenance and mineral continuity, an exceptional situation within the district.
This continuity of space, people, and materials gives the studio a rare stability. The same clays, stored and studied over decades, are worked in the same place, by the same hands, with methods refined rather than replaced. For collectors and tea drinkers alike, this translates into a level of traceability and consistency that is increasingly uncommon in Yixing today - and an awareness that each piece belongs to a finite chapter, shaped by resources that will not return.
Over time, the studio has moved through several locations, eventually arriving at its current space, which, in addition to Lian Meiping and Yuan Weixin, includes two other artisans: Yuanfeng and Pengming.
Yuanfeng is both Yuan Weixin’s nephew and his long-standing student, having followed him for more than ten years. Other students, including Jiang Wenen 蒋文文 and Ding Ning 丁宁, also visit the studio regularly since their younger years.
Our pieces
The valuations of Lian Meiping and Yuan Weixin differ, and they have followed different trajectories over the years - like the district itself - reflecting their art, their raw materials, and their personal lives.
In recent years, Lian Meiping has worked exclusively on commission, primarily for long-standing clients. In her decorations, she always uses clays of the highest quality, with correspondingly high valuations.
Yuan Weixin, together with Yuanfeng and Pengming, balances the production of pieces with complex engraving with more classical works. These latter pieces are found in many of your homes, and soon our range will be enriched with several works by Lian Meiping—until now sold only as custom pieces—from our private collection.
The immediate future
In recent years, we have travelled to Yixing very frequently, pursuing a personal research path that is now becoming something larger and more structured - and, as often happens for us, something professional and public.
We will develop two lines. The first, as is typical for us, will be content: we are building a project with media we deeply love (and which you may already suspect!), and this has been engaging and inspiring us greatly.
The second concerns the product line: we will soon introduce new artists, also part of the same network of relationships. Through artefacts, we want to trace a narrative of human relationships, composing a multiplicity of artistic identities united by personal bonds and mutual respect. Around Lian Meiping and Yuan Weixin, a mosaic will take shape, representing the last decades of the district’s history, following the intersection of their story with ours. It will be wonderful to hear your thoughts as all of this unfolds and becomes reality.
For all this, we naturally thank the people mentioned in this article. But our deepest thanks go to all the guests we have welcomed over the years and accompanied to Yixing - those who have already lived these stories with us and motivated us to make them accessible to anyone who may be interested.
This is our preferred way of communicating: to live intensely what we love, to engage with you fellow enthusiasts, and - when we feel the time is right, when everything has matured - to offer it to you in the form that feels most natural to us.
Let us know if there are topics you would like us to explore further, or if you have questions or suggestions. We will be glad to listen.
