Jian Zhan bowls were designed with the perfect shapes and angles to hold the frothy tea and accentuate the aroma of the liquid. But most importantly, they fired deep dark blacks and reds with flecks of gold. These dark colors were the perfect contrast to the white and green of the tea they held, making the tea seem even more pure. The natural firing techniques led to great variation, in line with the Song Dynasty scholarly values of appreciating the beauty of nature. With each bowl fired completely unique, the competition of tea whisking and drinking took a step towards a true tea ceremony when the beauty of the bowl encouraged contemplation while sipping.

The ceremony of whisking tea in Jian Zhan bowls is the great ancestor to both Chinese gong fu tea and Japanese Chado. Japan studied tea culture in China during this period and worked to attempt to recreate the perfect conditions of nature in Shuiji through Tenmokku ceramics, which led to the wider art of creating the perfectly imperfect chawan.

The beauty of Jian Zhan is undeniable and stunning. The pieces fired in the Song Dynasty have an incredible luster. The deep black of their glaze is flecked with gold, like a dragon’s hoard long lost to a dark ocean, or stars across the night sky. The black is broken by deep fractal-like crystalline structures that glow silver-blue, and accented by deep reds and oranges. Every piece has a different balance of these elements depending on the temperatures it was exposed to in firing within the kiln. There is no way to control for one style or another in true kiln-fired Jian Zhan. The beauty of each piece is its own by pure happenstance.

Jian Zhan from the Song Dynasty has been the subject of recent study by scientists who discovered that it contains a unique and incredibly difficult to produce crystalline formation known as epsilon phase iron oxide. This formation is produced in modern labs using massive amounts of electricity in tiny quantities for use in precision data-storage electronics. The formations in Jian Zhan ceramics occurring naturally are staggeringly larger than those produced in labs. Coincidentally, the Jian Zhan pieces with the highest count of epsilon phase iron oxide are also some of the most coveted for their very beautiful silvery appearance!

One of the beautiful attributes of Jian Zhan lies in their crystalline structures. These occur in the natural glaze through firing, and these will subtly change over time through constant use. Tea oils are slowly absorbed into the cup, not so much building a patina (like yixing tea pots) as very slightly altering the way the crystals refract light, acting as a sort of ‘lens’. This effect grows through constant use of a Jian Zhan tea bowl, making it more beautiful over time.

This very subtle effect gave Jian Zhan the kind of collectible value in the Song Dynasty that Yixing teapots have today. The incredible glaze was even thought to slow the way that green tea slowly becomes flat and off if left in a cup for a long time, meaning that green tea whisked at competitions would better preserve its full, crisp sweet quality.

While many specialized implements for tea ceremony would come over the next many hundred years, Jian Zhan was the first. It is still one of the most perfectly realized objects devoted to the beauty and culture of tea. How sad then that the Jurchen invasion brought the Song to an abrupt end, and with it, the secrets of Song dynasty Jian Zhan glazing and firing techniques were lost. Tea culture in China was flourishing like never before, only to suffer a great cataclysm that would change its course permanently.

In contrast, Japan continued the Song dynasty tradition, elaborating on the Song ceremony to create Chado. With their source of Jian Zhan bowls cut off, they worked to fire replicas called Tenmoku, which developed into a beautiful art of its own made to fit the very different clay, glazing, kilns and climates of Japan. Chinese tea ceremony eventually grew into the steeping of looseleaf tea with a very different set of tools developed to accentuate the beauty of full tea leaves, specifically Jingdezhen porcelain.

Up into about the 1990’s, the world believed that the techniques and quality of the Song Dynasty could never be replicated. Indeed, recreating the highly complex, chance-based firing process of Jian Zhan would be like trying to make a modern violin sound exactly like a Stradivarius down to every sound wave measured.

But things have changed. In the last thirty years, the Chinese interest in rediscovering their Song Dynasty heritage has grown. The values of the previous dynastys like the Qing and the Ming left no room for rediscovering an old heritage. The early years of the People’s Republic of China certainly left no room for looking towards the aristocratic past. The conditions for truly respecting and studying the Song have come about in China for the first time since the Jurchens captured emperor Song Huizong in 1127.

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