Editorial Conversation: Chapter 8, Section 9: Duanni Ore and Clay

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[00:00:05] Jason Cohen: Hello everyone, I'm Jason Cohen, the author of An Introduction to the Art and Science of Chinese Tea Ceremony. Today we're discussing Book 2, Chapter 8, Section 9, Duanni Ore and Clay. Here to talk about this chapter is our editorial team, Patrick Penny.

[00:00:20] Pat Penny: Hey, hey!

[00:00:20] Jason Cohen: And Zongjun Li.

[00:00:22] Zongjun Li: Hello.

[00:00:23] Jason Cohen: Hello to both of you.

This is it. We've reached the end of the singular clay chapters after months of discussing the eight types of zisha clay.

What have we learned?

[00:00:34] Pat Penny: I think it's a lot of what have I unlearned? Because I think my preconceived notions and the knowledge I thought I had on a lot of these specific clays was just, in many cases, just not right. And in some cases, just misinformed.

But as we've gone chapter by chapter, through hongni (红泥), zhuni (朱泥), duanni (段泥), etc, it just become very clear to me that I don't think there was really great resources online, as we were learning and still to this day to really understand the differences between these clays, and so I'm going to be re reading these chapters, probably actually a couple times because they are dense. There's a lot of information here, but there's just so much that I did not know prior to going into this book, which really blew me away.

[00:01:14] Zongjun Li: For me, it's never judge the quality of the clay by its name. For zini (紫泥), it's not necessarily purple. For luni (绿泥), it's not necessarily green and there's just so many different types of variations underneath each category which has been a fun journey.

[00:01:30] Jason Cohen: I entirely agree with both of you and Pat. I really appreciate that idea of unlearning, where there were so many things that we thought that we knew, and I know we've said this before, but starting to write the book, we picked this as the second book, because we said, okay, we could write a little bit about Yixing, this shouldn't be too long, this shouldn't be too complicated. And now, a thousand pages later, we're less than halfway through the book on chapter eight, section nine or more than a hundred pages into writing about each specific clay.

And there is so much that as practitioners we didn't learn that wasn't obvious, that even now having learned it, it's not so obvious. And it makes it difficult to understand both the scope and expanse of the complexity of the art form, but it also makes it maybe humbling in a way to think we, and this leads me to the next question, we have now nine chapters that contain cumulatively hundreds of rows on each specific clay. And those weren't the only clays that are out there, there's missing ones that I reference in the chapter. Even today, we talk about white jade duanni (白玉段), and that's not a row, right? We don't have all the details of it.

So how should readers and listeners think about those hundreds of rows? What can they do with that data that we painstakingly compiled? What should they take from it? What do you take from it?

[00:03:00] Zongjun Li: Some of the clays are just too esoteric and rare for people to accidentally run into. And if they do run into this kind of clay in a tea shop, by the street, I would say that's a giant red flag or alarm clock. Like you should raise your question mark and try to reference the book Tea Technique and see if that's actually that specific clay that you are playing with.

[00:03:24] Jason Cohen: No Qing Long Shan (青龙山), Tai Xi Village (台西村)mining site, surface layer tuanni (团泥) type 3? So that's not the label written in the teashop?

[00:03:32] Zongjun Li: This one is only 3,000 RMB. You are in luck today! Yeah, I think that will serve as a pretty good reference point of what clays are there, exist and what, people might claim to be.

But also at the same time, it will offer you some basic detail of what the clay will look like, or what the texture will be, to have a base layer reference point for any claims.

[00:03:54] Pat Penny: Yeah, I think for me, thinking about how I would go about using it, for the clays that I really have no idea what I have on hand, right, I bought it from a store, the merchant told me it was such and such, but I know that there's maybe a shred of truth there, but it's probably not the entire truth. I'll probably look over some of the details within these various tables that you've laid out through the book and look at what texture should I be expecting? And what are some of the chemical compositions which may affect shine or inclusion of mica? So I probably look through some of that to try and identify clays that I do own or match them against what they've been told to me to be.

But then for clays where I have purchased it directly from an artist, right, we all have gotten commissioned pieces that we've made that we have a very good idea of what clays we have. For those, I'm going to go back to the book and try and really understand. Okay, I do have this clay on hand. What should I be looking for in this specific ore, in this type of clay, to really just better understand it.

So I'll probably be using it as a reference to better understand what I do have and try to come to understandings with the things that I have that I'm not so sure about.

[00:04:55] Jason Cohen: That makes a ton of sense. So re examining your own collection, re examining your own wares, now with a reference and an understanding that it be close to, to one of the listed ones. That's a very interesting thing to do. It would be interesting to try to go through some of the antiques that we each collectively have, see if it matches perfectly or adjacently with any of the labeled ones.

So speaking of those labels, the table in this chapter specifically for duanni (段泥), they're all numbered, type 1, type 2, type 3, et cetera, and yet when we're discussing with artisans or we're discussing with other practitioners, no one uses, no one says, for example, the type that I just used: Tai Xi Village (台西村)mining site, surface layer type 3. We'd never see that right, outside of this type of encyclopedic treatise. We more commonly see or hear the aggrandizing names such as jin duanni (金段泥), gold duanni (段泥), or xie huang duanni (蟹黄段泥), crab yellow duanni (段泥).

What explains that discrepancy?  Why is there this difference in use of terminology?

[00:05:55] Pat Penny: I think about it just as a customer. Even as an informed customer, it's not very exciting to walk into a teapot shop and to be like, oh, yeah, I've been looking for a shaft mine number four, like duanni (段泥) type two. This has the perfect color and everything to it. This is exactly the piece to complete my collection.

From just the marketing and consumer angle, there wouldn't be very much about going through and collecting them all like Pokeballs, where you've just got your one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, right? I don't know. That, that probably wouldn't really fulfill me as a collector.

[00:06:24] Zongjun Li: I'm really a type 4 kind of guy.

[00:06:26] Pat Penny: We all know. The listeners know too, Zongjun.

When you hear things like, gold, jade, all these different descriptions, I think there's gotta be a real marketing element to where you just feel like, oh I've collected this piece and whether or not it's going to really do anything for you as a brewer is questionable, but when you think about what you have in your collection, you've now added this jewel to the collection versus a number.

[00:06:48] Jason Cohen: I agree with that explanation, but do you also think that there's a difference in who the collector bases are in the use of these aggrandizing names, or can we consider them to be the common names, or were they the names of the artisans versus the names of literati, because the literati didn't seem to give these typed names. Many of the other chapters include aggrandizing names in tables, so what is the source of this difference?

[00:07:12] Zongjun Li: I used another example that we have seen in the previous chapter to serve my point. For example, there are a lot of zhima luni (芝麻绿泥). Different types from different regions, but they are all called zhima luni (芝麻绿泥) because it has the black speckles on the surface of the ore. If you only use zhima luni (芝麻绿泥), sesame luni as the reference point or categorization, it's just not enough. There are so many variations underneath that too. Like huang jin duan (黄金段) or for bai yu duan (白玉段), there also will be so many variations underneath that specific group with the more grandized name. So from a research point of view, we found it to be more specific to give all these different variations a specific type number, but that's also from a ore and texture perspective. Once the ore gets processed into clay and gets fired into teapot, it will be frequently very hard to tell the difference between each variations.

So from that perspective, just using a generic color plus clay type combination would not be sufficient for our research.

[00:08:19] Pat Penny: I wonder how much of it has to do with duanni (段泥) also not being a pure singular ore of any sort.

[00:08:25] Jason Cohen: That's a great point, which leads me to my next question. All other zisha is a singular material, yet duanni (段泥) is a mixed material. What does that mean for collectors and practitioner? What is that difference? What does it mean to be a mixed material?

[00:08:39] Zongjun Li: I feel like the first great challenge is that the end product will be very hard for collectors or beginner collectors or even sometimes experienced collectors to tell like what specific type of duanni (段泥) or even what specific type of clay it is. Because duanni (段泥) can be fired into a very wide range of color depending on their paragenesis type and also firing temperature and firing atmosphere.

[00:09:06] Pat Penny: I think, additionally, there's just no one truth with duanni (段泥). We can make some broad generalizations with other types of clay and say, zini (紫泥) is going to have generally this effect, and zhuni (朱泥) might have this effect in most cases. But duanni (段泥) is going to be a bit of a crapshoot in almost all regards, because you really aren't going to be sure of how it's going to affect your tea until you've bought it and used it.

[00:09:29] Jason Cohen: We use the term paragenesis throughout this chapter. Can you describe or define that term for us?

[00:09:36] Zongjun Li: Yeah, so basically it's when a specific type of mineral intergrows with other types. For example, in this case, duanni (段泥), you generally found it to grow with zini (紫泥) and luni (绿泥) and sometimes hongni (红泥) and luni (绿泥). So it's always in existence with other clays.

It's rarely to be found to be growing on its own. So you will always have contamination from other clays. So that's why the color range of duanni (段泥) is so wide in many cases.

[00:10:05] Pat Penny: So is that to say that you'll never have a pure and true duanni (段泥) ore teapot?

[00:10:13] Jason Cohen: There is no pure true duanni (段泥) ore. Perhaps we can go back and forth on this.

Perhaps the way to think about it is that duanni (段泥) is more weathered than the other ores. You already have the formation of luni (绿泥), plus almost always luni (绿泥), plus something else, most often zini (紫泥). And then they continue to weather together. They continue to weather together to the point where the ores are decomposing and weathering into each other, which as Zongjun correctly as mineral intergrowth.

And, the decomposition of two ores in close adjacency, together weathering, forming a new ore that could be mined is duanni (段泥), and the different paragenenses create some materials that are more common than others, but it can also create some highly esoteric and rare variations to the point where this chapter has many more rows, type 1, type 2, type 3, type 4 than any of the other chapters because of all of those variations, and those are all really just approximates. That's saying that in this area, these are the 10 common variations that we see, but if you get up or down in the layers, they vary.

[00:11:25] Pat Penny: I wonder how to think about this as a collector, right? Because we've got so many hyped types of clay, we were talking about zhuni (朱泥) has had its moment for a long time.

Some things like tian qing ni zini (天青泥紫泥) have gotten in and out of favor. You never hear anyone go, Oh this duanni (段泥) was a particularly heavy paragenesis with zhuni (朱泥) or hongni (红泥) or something, and that's why this is a better duanni (段泥) ore or clay than another ore.

That's why this duanni (段泥) teapot should be more coveted than another. I feel like I never hear it to that point, so I wonder how and when maybe that hype cycle would happen, but how to really think about it as a collector.

[00:12:01] Jason Cohen: Well, it hasn't hit the Western market yet, but there are certainly sought after variations of duanni (段泥) that are not luni (绿泥) and zini (紫泥).

We do see paragenesis of luni (绿泥) and zhuni (朱泥) which creates some exceedingly rare variations that fire to a copper color. There are copper colored antique duannis (段泥) that are more red than pale. And so those variations can be highly sought after. We saw one that I had never heard of and never had thought of previously in our most recent research trip. Our white jade duanni (白玉段), which we include a picture of here, where the duanni (段泥) fire is totally white.

So that was a long way of saying it hasn't really hit the Western market, but there are some quite esoteric forms of duanni (段泥) that do seem to be sought after both contemporary and antique in the Chinese market.

Here's an interesting and difficult question. Are there different levels of paragenesis? Do we see variations in the particles included in duanni (段泥) clay?

[00:13:02] Zongjun Li: Yeah, some paragenesis are definitely coarser and ununified compared to others, which makes duanni (段泥) hard to process, requires more technique. So for example, a common flaw in duanni (段泥) teapot would be the dragon tail dragging effect, or tuo wei xian xiang (拖尾现象). It's when certain larger grains from other clay type whether zini (紫泥) or hongni (红泥) or luni (绿泥) that's buried inside a duanni (段泥) layer and acts like an inclusion.

And then when you're trying to do smoothing or scraping when making your teapot, when you touch the grain that's hidden as a nice surprise in the clay, you scoop the different color of clay all the way around the teapot, which makes it an obvious flaw during teapot making.

[00:13:46] Jason Cohen: And to summarize that, so those are unweathered or less weathered grains of the preparagenesis ores, such as an embedded hongni (红泥) particle in duanni (段泥) clay. And that's what causes the scratching and coloration.

[00:14:02] Pat Penny: It's interesting to think about levels, though, because levels brings me to value proposition of some sort, right? And so, when I think about is one more valuable than another, when we think about it from the lens of tea practitioners, the visuals is, of course, one part of phenomenology.

But as we mentioned earlier, duanni (段泥) teapots and their interactions with tea, are going to be totally different depending on what those parageneses were. So I wonder how to think about how to value different duanni (段泥) clays depending on what the paragenesis might have been.

[00:14:37] Jason Cohen: Oh, that's a very interesting question.

I wonder if we see more uniform effects or maybe, I don't know if this is the correct idea, but less chaotic effects from more thorough paragenesis. I wouldn't say the word levels again, but the idea that the two ores are now entirely melded versus only partially melded.

 [00:15:00] Zongjun Li: Yeah, just by reading all the materials from our research, it seems like people tend to regard teapots or duannis (段泥) with more vibrant and more saturated kind of color to be regarded as a higher value, more collectible. So I feel like that's a tendency. How exactly a mixture can reach to that that kind of color will be a mystery to me.

[00:15:23] Jason Cohen: Speaking of that, duanni (段泥) appears to me as a well liked clay, particularly amongst higher level practitioners.

So what differences in praxis do we see in the use of duanni (段泥) wares as practitioners gain skill?

[00:15:35] Pat Penny: I would say in my experience, I have very rarely seen high level practitioners break out duanni (段泥), but when they have, it's because they understood that this exact precise tea, not a genre of tea, but this very specific tea works perfectly with this specific duanni (段泥) pot. And so it's been a really pot and singular tea pairing and not so much a broad category pairing.

[00:15:57] Jason Cohen: Have any of those pairings been shocking or surprising or have any of them been terrible and you thought what is this individual doing?

[00:16:05] Pat Penny: As I said, my experience with duanni (段泥) and my understanding of duanni (段泥) was not very fully formed until reading this chapter.

And I've only been using duanni (段泥) teapots really in the last two years. And so every time I had those pairings, to me it was a shock because I really didn't understand duanni (段泥) and I would have this tea and be like, whoa, duanni (段泥) can do this? Is this what duanni (段泥) teapots do? But never really understood why or how.

So I think now, as I'm learning more about duanni (段泥) and using it I can see, okay, this practitioner just really knew exactly what this teapot does and apply the perfect tea for it. They probably were not going to break it out for all the other teas we were having that day because they knew it wouldn't do what they wanted it to do.

[00:16:45] Zongjun Li: And I feel like from my observation, that for higher practitioner duanni (段泥) and a few other lighter colored clay are the only type of teapots that they will use to brew green tea or other lighter flavored teas. Also to Pat's point is that when practitioners are trying to use duanni (段泥) to brew tea, they have a very specific mind in their intention to brew tea.

[00:17:08] Jason Cohen: I'm complimented Zongjun. Thank you.

I have an antique late Qing duanni (段泥) teapot that I use nearly exclusively for longjing and it is my most surprising and one of my absolute favorite pairings.

[00:17:21] Zongjun Li: I would love to try more of your longjing, Jason.

[00:17:25] Jason Cohen: I think both of you have had it together with me.

[00:17:27] Pat Penny: Yeah.

[00:17:28] Zongjun Li: Too infrequently.

[00:17:30] Jason Cohen: Come over more, bring longjing.

Zongjun, this question is specifically for you. Can you talk to us about the difference in meaning between the terms duanni (段泥) and tuanni (团泥)?

Why do some collectors insist on using the less common term tuanni (团泥) when discussing the ore and clay?

[00:17:45] Zongjun Li: Really, it's the never ending convoluted naming system of zisha that extended to all kinds of clay. You have jiani (甲泥) and jiani (夹泥) and now you have tuanni (团泥) and duanni (段泥). And even between duanni (段泥), you have the regular duan (段) that we've been seeing and also the duan (缎) with the texture radical, which means like satin.

So I think it's really a, a legacy convention or habits that people inherit from their community or circles. And the very reason is that they are referring to different feature of the same clay. You have duanni (段泥), which generally referring to the texture of the clay being more satin like and smooth in texture, but for tuanni (团泥), it means to mix together, to compiled together. So I think that's more referring to the paragenesis nature of this clay being a combination of various different kind of materials. It's really a kind of like a legacy habit that people tend to adapt one way or another, which only leads to confusions for future generations to study zisha.

[00:18:57] Jason Cohen: That's all the time that we have today. Thank you everyone for joining us in this edition of Tea Technique Editorial Conversations. Please join us again for our next conversation, Other Zisha Clay Formulation Techniques.