What is being sold
Prices for unglazed Chinese teapots span several orders of magnitude, and the difference is attributed to three things: the clay, the maker and the age. A buyer can assess none of them directly. What a buyer can assess is workmanship — how the lid seats, how the spout is finished, how cleanly the pot pours, whether the interior is neatly worked — and those are also the properties that affect the tea. It is worth noticing how rarely they are what the price is being justified on.
The clay claim
Yixing zisha is sold in named categories — zini, zhuni, duanni and finer subdivisions — with specific flavour consequences attributed to each. TeaHQ records these as material names and does not repeat the flavour attributions, for two reasons given in full elsewhere: the claimed differences are small next to the differences between individual pots of the same clay in wall thickness and firing, and the supply chain is one in which the description of a clay is frequently the only evidence for it. A clay claim on a listing is a claim about what a seller wrote.
The maker claim
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
Pots are stamped with a maker’s seal, and seals are copied. A stamp is not authentication, certificates issued by sellers are not authentication, and a photograph of a workshop is not authentication. Where a genuine attribution exists it comes with a documented chain of ownership, and that chain is itself the expensive part. For most buyers the practical conclusion is straightforward: buy the pot, not the name, and pay what the object is worth to you as an object.
The age claim, and the founding story
Repeated very widely and not evidenced. Recorded because the story is itself part of the culture, not because it happened.
Yixing’s teapot tradition is conventionally dated to the Ming period, and the invention of the form is popularly credited to a monk’s servant named Gongchun. That story is repeated in nearly every account and is not evidenced in a way TeaHQ can verify; it is best understood as a founding legend of the craft rather than as a record of who did what. Age claims on individual pots inherit the same problem in a sharper form, because a pot cannot be dated from a photograph and an unglazed pot in good condition looks much the same at thirty years as at ninety.
Where the incentives point
This is a market in which the seller holds all the verifiable information, the buyer holds none, the goods do not degrade in a way that reveals a lie, and the story is a large share of the price. Those conditions describe a market that will produce misrepresentation whether or not anyone sets out to misrepresent. That is not an accusation against sellers; it is a structural observation, and it is the reason TeaHQ will not repeat a clay or maker attribution as fact.
How to buy sensibly
Set a budget you would be content to have spent on a pot with no story attached, then buy the best-made object available within it from a seller who will describe its working properties. A well-made inexpensive pot that pours cleanly and empties completely will make better tea than a costly one that dribbles, and this is the one comparison in the market that is not contested by anybody.