A life steeped in tea and craft
Gao Liuzhou’s path to becoming a tea master began, he often says, not with a cup but with a question. Raised in a family of calligraphers in Beijing, he was drawn to the ritual silence that accompanied ink grinding — a stillness he later rediscovered in the tea rooms of southern China. At seventeen, he left home to study with an old gōngfu tea master in Chaozhou, where he learned to read the minute variations in a Dan Cong oolong’s fragrance, from the high floral notes of Mí Lán Xiāng to the roasted depth of Yā Shī Xiāng. For over a decade, Gao honed his sensory memory until he could identify a tea’s origin village and the weather of its harvest season with a single sniff.
Yet, as his expertise deepened, so did his unease with what surrounded the tea. The cups were often adequate, the storage tins forgettable, the lighting harsh overhead glare. Tea, he realized, was not just about the leaf — it was about the entire sensory container. A poorly sealed canister could flatten a millennium of culture in a week; a fluorescent bulb could dissolve the contemplative mood that the tea so carefully built.
This insight pushed Gao toward glass. He began visiting glass-blowing workshops in Boshan, Shandong, where the tradition of liaoqi (料器) — Chinese art glass — stretches back centuries. There he studied under master blower Wei Liming, learning to shape borosilicate glass into airtight forms with the kind of seamless precision that could protect the most delicate white tea buds. His philosophy: a tea canister should be as pure and transparent as the first infusion, allowing the leaves to breathe while shielding them from light and moisture.
At Teamotea, Gao Liuzhou holds the title of tea master, but his role is uniquely cross-disciplinary. He sources teas, evaluates their storage conditions, and — most importantly — designs the glass pieces that bring the tea room into harmony. His hand-blown pendant lamp, the first product developed for tea.furniture, emerged from hundreds of hours of testing how warm, low-light temperature shifts the perception of tea color and body. For Gao, every piece is an invitation to slow down and notice. That is the tea master’s ultimate gift: not just to taste, but to see.
From the glass workshops of Boshan
Gao Liuzhou’s glass pieces are born not on a tea plantation, but in the fire-lit workshops of Boshan, Zibo — a city in Shandong province known for its glass-blowing heritage that predates the Ming dynasty. Here, among rows of roaring furnaces and skilled artisans who inherited formulas from their grandfathers, Gao maintains a small studio and testing area. The space is equal parts tea room and laboratory: a low chá pán desk sits near a wall of handmade canister prototypes, each labeled with the tea it held and the precise humidity curve it produced. Filtered daylight falls through a skylight, exactly the north-facing light that reveals the true color of a glass’s clarity without causing heat damage to the teas inside.
The canister design begins with the leaf. Gao will bring a fresh harvest — say, a batch of Bái Háo Yín Zhēn from Fuding — and store it in multiple prototypes under controlled conditions for months, testing aroma and moisture absorption daily. The final form of the Glass canister set — six 200ml is a direct result of this empirical, tea-first process: the borosilicate walls are thick enough to resist temperature swings, the rim is ground to a perfect seal without a rubber ring, and the height-to-width ratio minimizes air exchange while allowing the leaf to expand. A subtle frosted band on the lid signals the ideal fill line, a quiet note of instruction that only a tea master would include.
The pendant lamp — warm low — was developed with the same meticulous rigor. Gao tested over thirty glass thicknesses and filament temperatures before arriving at the amber-edged illumination that mimics the golden hour light of a late-afternoon tea session. In his Boshan studio, after the artisans have gone home, he sits under that lamp pouring shu pu-erh, judging not just the tea but the world the light creates.