How the Teacup Got its Handle

 It took a century to turn the tea bowl into the tea cup. In China and Japan, tea had always been served in a small dish, without an attached handle or a saucer. The hot tea cooled quickly and drinkers kept the bowl refilled. Europe imported China’s fine porcelain because it couldn’t unlock the secrets of how to copy it. China had been making porcelain bowls and pots since, at the very latest, 100 BCE. It had a  monopoly and intended to keep it that way. For over a century, Europe sipped its teas in dishes.

That changed at the beginning of the 18th century. The invention of hard paste porcelain enabled handles that were integral to the cup, stood up to heat and didn’t snap off.

The new luxury drink created a wealth of markets that domestic European suppliers could feed. One of the new goods was a lockable tea caddy to be stored safely like a jewelry box. (A sensible habit: until the 19th century, a pound of tea cost the average annual wage of a worker.) New teaware for flaunting this wealth and fashion included silver pots, metal sugar tongs, cream pots, tea strainers, tea tables caddies and other expensive paraphenalia. The truly stunning glazes, designs and colors of China imports were hot fashion items.

Silversmiths could easily put a spout on a teapot but the Europeans craft makers weren’t able to make china that was strong, didn’t crack or melt, and that they could attach a handle to. Even the Venetians, the master glass makers, failed to find the secret of China porcelain, as had the Italian Medicis and French potter makers.  It was a primary target of alchemists, like the search for the philosopher’s stone that would convert rock to gold.

Meanwhile the elites of Europe were scalding their hands.

Between 1700 and 1710, all this flipped. A German alchemist added kaolin clay to the paste he was using to make earthenware (to do the gold trick, of course.) This was one of the lucky accidents of invention; kaolin was the powder that gentlemen wearer of wigs put on them to whiten their appearance.

This lead to the creation of Meissen and Sevres, Limoges, the English names like Doulton, Chelsea, Crown Derby. Cups replaced bowls, with larger and smaller varieties, new shapes, flutes, glazes, wimples, gilt, bat printing, moor clay, Royal Albert, footed, and many hundreds of others. Handles were added, made more ornate, raised higher or lower on the side of the cup and produced their own rich jargon: egg handles, loop-broken, ring with square, serpent, stump and ring, to name just a few. 

The new hard porcelain and the even more innovative bone china that followed became the base for more than just a functional drinking vessel. Today, a large fraction of the antique tea sets of the past two centuries are still in circulation and for $10-30 an item you could build a collection via eBay that would fill every shelf in the average size house.

Now, the magnificent era of the cup with handle that replaced the bowl

Age may be passing back into oblivion. Dark Forces are  signaling the era of the Sleeve Holder, that slides onto your Starbucks cardboard mug. We have seen the future and it’s a koozie.

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