A village workshop, a bamboo standoff, and the search for the perfect pour
This stand comes from a small workshop in the hills of northern Fujian, not far from the bamboo forests that supply the region’s iconic woven ware. The carpenters there have long made ‘water towers’ for old tea houses — a cluster of three workshops up a dirt road 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. The master adjusted each joint and tested stability with a stone-filled pot. The workshop agreed 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. Each year the new harvest is inspected, and a dozen pieces are brought back.