Professor Katharine Burnett presented a paper at the international conference “Echoes of Great Brightness: The Ming Dynasty and Beyond.” Her paper “Chen Jiru, Shi Dabin, and the Marvelously Extraordinary, Inventively Original Teapot,” was part of the panel “Superfluous Things: The Production, Consumption, and Representation of Objects in Early Modern China.”

Burnett’s paper examined Zisha (purple clay) teapots made at the pottery town of Yixing in Jiangsu Province. These teapots have long been prized by tea connoisseurs for their flavor enhancing characteristics and their inventive shapes. The inventiveness of the shapes, formative in the late Ming, have become if not commonplace, commonly accepted as a norm for Yixing ceramics. While the tradition of potting in Yixing is millennia old, it was only in the mid-Ming that potters first began to create pots in inventive shapes; this inventiveness really took off and came to full fruition in the late Ming. The question is: Why? This paper looks at specific examples of late Ming teapots, contemporaneous art theory, and the known relationships between major potters (commoners) and art theorists (the intellectual elite) to help us better understand how ideas could have mixed between social groups, and how major aesthetic values of the day might have affected tea ware production.

“Echoes of Great Brightness: The Ming Dynasty and Beyond” was sponsored by The Department of History of Art and Centre for Visual Studies at Oxford University on Sept. 16-17, 2025.