A village workshop, a bamboo standoff, and Michael’s search for the perfect pour
Michael Zhan found this stand in a small workshop in the hills of northern Fujian, not far from the bamboo forests that supply the region’s iconic woven ware. He was sourcing heavy yancha for another project when a local fixer mentioned a carpenter who made ‘water towers’ for old tea houses. Intrigued, Michael hiked up a dirt road to a cluster of three workshops where fathers and sons still split bamboo by hand.
The carafe stand was not a commercial item — an elderly tea master had commissioned a set of six for his students, each one cut to a specific height based on the carafe the student owned. Michael spent two afternoons watching the master adjust joinery and test stability with a stone-filled pot. He convinced the workshop to produce a small batch with a standard height and top ring, using the same eight-year-old Moso bamboo that had been air-dried for three rainy seasons.
Each stand is assembled with mortise-and-tenon joints, no glue, no nails. The top ring is steamed and bent, then lashed with a single strand of rattan. Because the bamboo is living material, every stand has its own pattern of nodes and slight colour shifts — exactly the kind of irregularity that tea practitioners treasure. Michael returns once a year to inspect the new harvest and bring home a dozen pieces.