The Yixing Zisha Museum is located in Shangtang Old Street and welcomed visitors in May 2002. It gathers the finest Zisha art from the pottery capital, Yixing, in the ancient town of Jinxi, allowing tourists to appreciate the evolution of Zisha art culture from rough to delicate, abstract to realistic, and exaggerated to lifelike. Among the Zisha sculptures is the ‘Future Buddha’ Maitreya Buddha, and particularly the oversized ‘Dongpo Handle Pot’, which exaggerates the pot used by the Northern Song Dynasty literary figure Su Dongpo for brewing tea. This pot, made from coarse sand, is handcrafted and painted with colors, taking over 200 days from production, drying to firing, weighing 1.5 tons, and can serve 2000 people at once.
In the exhibition hall, various famous Zisha pots from different dynasties are displayed, including the prototype of Zisha pots – Song Dynasty Zisha pots, Ming Dynasty’s Time Dabin Handle Pot, Chen Ziqi’s Round Lantern Pot, Qing Dynasty’s Shao Daheng’s Dianqiu Pot, and the renowned ‘Mansheng Eighteen Style Pots’. There are also modern Zisha art creations such as colored pottery, Jun pottery with piled flowers, and Zisha bottles, among which are works that have won awards nationally and internationally in recent years. The Dabin Handle Pot exhibited in the museum is considered a national treasure, alongside the Dabin-style Zisha pot with lacquer coating from the Palace Museum and the Time Dabin Six-Sided Zisha Pot from Yangzhou Museum. Chen Ziqi’s Round Lantern Pot from the Ming Dynasty is a masterpiece of the ‘life-like pot’ from the early Ming period. The ‘Mansheng Eighteen Style’ is inscribed by Chen Hongshou (styled Mansheng), one of the Western Leng Eight, and made by Yang Pengnian, who is known as a family of Zisha artists, and is considered a treasure in the Zisha world.
Opening hours are from April 1st to October 31st, 08:00-17:00; from November 1st to December 31st, 08:00-16:30; and from January 1st to March 31st, 08:00-16:30. The specific opening times are subject to the actual conditions of the scenic area on the day.
Yixing Zisha Pots
The Yixing Zisha Museum is located in Shangtang Old Street and welcomed visitors in May 2002. It gat[...]
