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Masters of OB01R I SSfW mmmtm purple clay - c By ZHANG KUN 0 Whether your favourite tea tipple is co loured green or black, the receptacle that is mm perfect for pouring it from may well be purple > ’ 1 .41 I Ji or some other colour. t saan» For such are the colour of the teapots pro duced in the city of Yixing, Jiangsu province, i KN known all over China for the production of '> * exquisite ceramic ware. . Thousands of craftsmen and craftswomen make these unglazed ceramic teapots, known as Zisha pots, in studios, factories and bou tiques throughout the city. No one seems to know exactly how many teapots and cups are produced in Yixing, but in any case it is often a figure of a very dif ferent kind relating to this purple ware that m makes the headlines in China: its price. At Left: Customers wait at an All Things Renew outlet in Shanghai to recycle their goods, ding lei / for china daily Right: A consumer (right) checks out recycled mobile phones at an All Things an auction in Beijing in 2015, for example, a Renew phone recycling station in Shanghai in October, ren yuming / for china daily 10-piece purple clay tea set made by the arti san Gu Jingzhou set a record for the price of such art, fetching 92m yuan ($14.3m). Made from clay taken from rock mines, Yi xing purple clay teapots, named after their sig Buying used goods a growing phenomenon nature colour, are largely handmade. Craftspeople spend years learning to press wet clay into a perfect flat piece, before turn ing it into a pot. The few tools they use include spatulas, small hammers and needles made of Recycling economy in 2018, 30 per cent more than in the previous form All Things Renew, formally known as Ai- Economy Institute, a domestic consultancy, said bamboo, wood or steel. year, according to a report by the market research huishou, announced it had completed more than the country’s secondhand market, which is still at Yixing, more than 2,000 years old, is in the becomes a big hit among the company AskCI Consulting Co of Shenzhen. The $100m in a series of E+ round of financing, which a nascent stage, has huge growth potential, and centre of the Yangtze River Delta, on the west environmentally conscious figure was estimated to reach ltn yuan in 2020. was jointly led by the e-commerce company JD the penetration rate of online recycling and trad ern bank of Taihu Lake. It has a rich cultural More than lm users advertise more than 2m and Guotai Junan International Holdings. ing platforms is still relatively small. heritage, nurturing many renowned academ used goods daily on Xianyu, ranging from appar The company, established in 2011, specialises The booming sharing economy and changing ics, authors and artists, and became a ceram By FAN FEIFEI el, shoes, smartphones, cosmetics, maternal and in recycling and trading secondhand electronic consumption habits and concepts that are green ics centre 600 years ago. baby products to furniture and home appliances. goods, such as cameras, phones and laptops. It er and more sustainable have stimulated massive That was with the founding of the Ming Dy ang Hao, 27, an engineer with a Xianyu, established in 2014, has become one has opened more than 700 physical shops in 140 growth of the secondhand economy, Mr Mo said. nasty (1368-1644), said Zhou Xiaodong, direc software company in Beijing, is a of the largest online trading platforms for used cities, with the daily trading volume of comput The new business model has encountered tor of the Yixing Ceramics Museum. pen aficionado. He usually buys goods in China. The company said its gross mer ers, consumer electronics and communication problems though. Sellers have more information The first Ming emperor made Nanjing the Wand sells the writing instruments chandise volume surpassed 200bn yuan in 2019 products exceeding 70,000 units. than buyers before transactions occur on these dynasty’s capital, and the ambitious new rul on Xianyu, a popular customer-to-customer plat and its online sellers reached “We will strengthen in-depth platforms, which may result in fake and inferior ers began building up the economies, espe form in China for trading secondhand goods run 30m, with those under the age omnichannel collaboration quality commodities and fraudulent behaviour cially in nearby cities such as Yixing. The city by Alibaba Group. of 30 accounting for more than with JD and seize opportuni during transaction processes, Mr Mo said. began to specialise in producing pottery and “I love collecting various types of pens with 60 per cent. It says it has 90m 1 ties arising from upgrades to “How to deal with these issues and establish ceramics, at first to meet burgeoning demand unique designs and excellent workmanship, such monthly active users. 5G mobile phones,” said Chen mutual trust between sellers and buyers is key to from the capital. as Lamy, Montblanc, Parker, Sailor, Duke and There is huge potential in trillion yuan Xuefeng, founder and chief ex the secondhand market.” In the same period Chinese people changed Hero,” Mr Wang said. “The new ones are often various sectors of the second estimated revenue of China’s ecutive of All Things Renew. Apart from electronic devices, demand for the way they drank tea, Mr Zhou said. very expensive, and I just use them for a short hand market. Recycling of secondhand goods market “In addition, we will accelerate used cars has surged in recent years as China is in 2020 “Hard-pressed tea was replaced by loose time and then switch to another.” smartphones and electronic our layout in the business-to- the biggest global used car market and the largest leaves, and people no longer boiled the tea on Buying used pens through online secondhand items, for example, represents consumer segment to upgrade carmaker. the stove, but simply poured hot water into e-commerce platforms can save a lot of money, a vast market. The Ministry of Industry and In our business model.” A report by Research and Markets said the the pot and let it brew.” he said, adding that the products can more eas formation Technology said that about 524m mo The market research firm IDC said global country’s used car market is expected to be worth The teapot thus took on greater significance ily reach new owners, while sellers can get extra bile phones may have been discarded last year, shipments of secondhand smartphones totaled $385bn by the end of 2025. The Chinese online in China’s tea drinking culture, and artisans in income. but only 2 per cent of them were recycled using 206.7m units in 2019, compared with 175.8m in used car dealing platforms including Guazi.com, Yixing began to make names for themselves Mr Wang is among Chinese increasingly con regular channels. 2018. Uxin and Renrenche are betting big on the bur with their creations. cerned about environmental issues. Rather than Online platforms provide users with a recy The used smartphone market continues to geoning segment. “The special mineral combination of Yixing shunning used goods, these people are looking cling channel and transparent pricing structures rise and shows no signs of slowing down across Dai Kun, chairman and chief executive of Uxin, clay makes the ceramic surface look grainy, for high-quality affordable products on second that are more stable and reliable than those of all parts of the globe, it said, with shipments ex said internet-based sales channels overcome geo but it feels smooth,” Mr Zhou said. hand platforms. fered by street vendors who deal in mobile phone pected to grow to 333m units by 2023, compound graphical restrictions of secondhand car trading After the clay is baked it becomes water China’s secondhand goods market continues recycling. annual growth reaching 13.6 per cent. so that consumers can easily choose high-quality/ proof ceramic, but is porous, allowing air in. to thrive. It had revenue of 740bn yuan ($115bn) The Chinese online electronics recycling plat Mo Daiqing, a senior analyst at the Internet low-priced used vehicles. This helps to maintain the aroma of Chinese tea, and it keeps its colour and taste for a long time. ‘Tor centuries tea drinking has been an im On culture, museums and cash cows portant part of Chinese culture,” Mr Zhou said. Today there are 30 master artisans in Yi xing who have been granted the title of nation al master of purple clay art, and more than 100 By XU UN a craftspeople have been recognised as “masters of Jiangsu province”. Chen Xiao bought a canvas bag online from the £ One of them is Fan Weiqun, 51, the fourth National Museum of China in Beijing, printed generation in a family of purple clay crafts with three characters from an ancient painting The value of creative cultural men, whose studio is in the same building as at the museum. The way they are displayed on Dasheng Art Museum, where the products of the bag, with its colourful straps integrated into products is not about their his forebears are on display. the graphic design, the three figures appear as if popularity or profit, but that When Mr Fan was a child the handicraft of they are playing with a skipping rope. It is one of teapot making had more or less been forgotten the museum’s popular creative cultural products. they serve as a bridge for in the family, he said. Only one pot had sur More people, like Ms Chen, are buying such museums to converse with vived and “we saw it only during Lunar New products, either for daily use or as souvenirs. Year, when my father would use it to make “Traditional culture contains many beautiful the public.” tea”, he said. elements that seem far-removed from our life, Liu Xiaobo, co-founder of the Beijing BES In 1984 Mr Fan’s parents agreed to lend that but such products connect our complex desire Cultural Creative Development Co heirloom teapot to the Yixing purple clay fac and need to connect with the past,” said Ms Chen, tory, whose director paid back the favour by a Beijing office worker. “It’s just like a bridge.” recruiting the young man to work as a young In August 2019 Tsinghua University and the apprentice. business-to-customer platform Tmall published - of the Beijing BES Cultural Creative Develop “It was the right time, the first few years of a report about the purchase of creative cultural ment Co, which has provided services pertaining China’s reform and opening-up,” Mr Fan said. products. The number of online visits to muse ■ B*m 7 to such products to scenic spots and museums. “Soon wealthy customers from Hong Kong ums’ flagship shops on Tmall was 1.6bn in the “These creative cultural products cater to the and Taiwan were coming to the city and order year to June that year, one and a half times core demands of consumers,” Mr Liu said. “Some ing purple clay teapots and paying as much as the number of physical visits to museums, the .u* even offer interactive experiences, and end up hundreds and even tens of thousands of yuan.” report said. -- being topics of conversation.” Then came purple clay aficionados from Of those who bought museum products at least He cites the example of “blind boxes” produced other countries such as South Korea and Ja three times in that period, more than half were and sold by Henan Museum in Zhengzhou, pan, who have the same cultural thirst for the bom in the 1990s and 2000s. From July 2018 to Henan province. It fulfills the customer’s dream tea drinking tradition. June 2019, sales of such museum products on of becoming an amateur archaeologist, simply by This increasing new demand inspired Yi Alibaba platforms tripled compared with sales Clockwise from left: Suzhou Museum's mooncakes, packaged with designs of woodblock digging into a clod of earth with a small shovel xing to put an effort into developing its purple from July 2016 to June 2017. Most were daily-use prints, provided to china daily Suzhou Museum’s drinking set designed to warm wine, printed with and a brush, to discover replica treasures inside. clay industry. Senior artisans and master art items, necessities, cosmetics and snacks. part of a painting by Wen Zhengming, a scholar-artist from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). They sold out several times in early December ists were invited to train young workers, and Many Chinese museums have won over shop provided to china daily The Palace Museum's pocket watch, inspired by the 24 divisions of the solar after someone told of their excavation on the special workshops were set up to produce ob pers through innovation and continuously up year in the Chinese lunar calendar, xu lin / china daily internet. jects for export. grading their products. “The primary goal of museums is to collect While teapot making is still handiwork, Mr The late Chinese-American architect Ieoh objects and present them to the public for the Fan and other artisans are ready to use the lat Ming Pei designed the new Suzhou Museum in derstand deeply the museum’s exhibits and their The trend of museums opening stores on purpose of education,” Mr Liu said. est technology in their work. Jiangsu province that opened in 2006. It soon history, and have an insight into the industry”. Tmall can be traced back to 2018, and the num “The value of creative cultural products is not “These can help you have a better percep became a city landmark. In 2018, when the museum opened its official ber has increased significantly each year since, about their popularity or profit, but that they tion of the dimensions and forms before they Last year the museum produced a series of online store on Tmall, the number of annual vis said Mo Ning, who is in charge of Tmall Culture. serve as a bridge for museums to converse with were made into clay,” he said. “The practice, products with quotes from Pei, printed in Chi its quickly surpassed those to the museum itself. In July 2018 the British Museum became the public.” heritage and skills are never lost.” nese and English, in commemoration of the first In 2019 online sales accounted for a third of the first overseas institution to open a store on He cites the Palace Museum as a good exam anniversary of his death. The design team, be the total, and in 2020 about half. Tmall, and sold out its entire stock within 16 ple. The museum, also known as the Forbidden fore developing the final creations, had read Pei’s “The pandemic has affected our physical days, Ms Mo said. City, was China’s imperial palace from 1420 to ■> books and watched hours of interview videos in stores, with a series of chain reactions,” Ms Jiang “The boom shows that Chinese consumers at 1911 and used to be forbidden to commoners in order to select 56 of his key observations about said. “Our current development of new products tach great importance to commodities that meet feudal times. Now it successfully promotes its architecture and life. is more focused on online platforms.” their intellectual needs, and that young Chinese culture and tells its stories vividly through its /4 The museum also owns a 480-year-old Chinese Since the beginning of last year more than 100 are attached to cultural traditions. Overseas mu various creative cultural products. wisteria, planted by the painter and calligrapher museums, galleries, scenic spots and culture and seums are eyeing the great Chinese market, too. “The success of the Palace Museum helped to Wen Zhengming (1470-1559) of the Ming Dynasty tourism institutions have opened online stores “As the market becomes more mature, more propel the development of creative cultural prod (1368-1644). on Taobao and Tmall, Alibaba Group’s e-com design institutions and colleges are joining in, ucts, with more museums riding the wave in re Since 2013 the museum has sold seeds of it merce platforms, about 80 per cent of which are and more brands engage in crossover collabo cent years,” Mr Liu said. for buyers to plant. One thousand boxes, each of domestic museums. ration to promote and highlight Chinese cul When he first entered the industry more than which hold three seeds, are available every year. The most popular museum stores on Tmall in ture and arts, demonstrating a national cultural 10 years ago it was hard to explain to people the To design good products, said Jiang Han, head clude the Palace Museum in Beijing, the British confidence.” definition of such products, let alone their ben Purple clay teapots are hand-sculpted by of the museum’s creative cultural products busi Museum, the National Museum of China, Dun- Popular creative cultural products have several efits, he said, whereas today, generally no expla craftspeople, gao erqiang / china daily ness, one needs to “have passion for the job, un- huang Academy and Shaanxi History Museum. things in common, said Liu Xiaobo, co-founder nation is needed. CONTACT US China Daily Advertising: China Daily U.S.A. 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