Our Story

Fire, Earth, and the Hands
That Shape Them

A journey through twelve centuries of porcelain mastery — from the imperial kilns of ancient China to the living workshops where tradition still burns bright.

Story Kilns History Process Collection Masters
Chapter I

The Story of
INFINITE TOMATO

Why we crossed oceans to bring the kiln home.

INFINITE TOMATO was born in a single moment — standing before a Jun-ware bowl in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, watching light dance across its copper-red glaze. One thousand years of fire and earth, held in two hands. We asked ourselves: why must one travel to a museum to encounter this?

The answer, we discovered, was complex. Master artisans work in remote kiln towns scattered across China — Jingdezhen, Dehua, Longquan, Yixing — places whose names appear on museum labels but rarely on shipping manifests. Their work fills galleries and auction houses, yet remains invisible to the global home. Between the kiln and the world stood layers of wholesale, export bureaucracy, and cultural disconnect.

We set out to change that. INFINITE TOMATO is a direct bridge: no intermediaries, no anonymous factory runs. Every piece in our collection comes from a named kiln, shaped by a master whose signature we know, fired in a town whose porcelain tradition spans centuries. We document the provenance. We translate the stories. We handle the logistics — from Foshan, Guangdong, to your doorstep.

Today we work with over forty master artisans across twelve kiln sites, each one a living national treasure in China's Intangible Cultural Heritage registry. Our collection spans tea sets for the gongfu ceremony, vases glazed with crystalline techniques lost and rediscovered, and tableware that brings Song-dynasty aesthetics to the modern dining table.

"Porcelain is not made. It is coaxed — from earth, through fire, into memory."

Chapter II

The Twelve Kilns

Each kiln site carries a distinct heritage, clay body, glazing tradition, and firing philosophy — no two are alike.

Jingdezhen
Jiangxi Province
The porcelain capital for over 1,000 years. Renowned for blue-and-white (qinghua), famille rose, and the impossibly thin "eggshell" bodies fired at 1,300°C.
Dehua
Fujian Province
Home of Blanc de Chine — luminous white porcelain with a warm ivory tone. Dehua clay fires to a glassy translucence prized since the Ming dynasty.
Yixing
Jiangsu Province
The zisha (purple clay) teapot capital. Yixing's unique stoneware, fired unglazed, absorbs tea oils with each brew — a living vessel that seasons over decades.
Longquan
Zhejiang Province
Celadon mastery since the Song dynasty. Longquan's jade-green glazes, achieved through iron-oxide reduction firing, evoke mist-shrouded mountains.
Shiwan
Guangdong Province
Figurative ceramic sculpture with a 500-year lineage. Shiwan's artisans are known for expressive human figures, glazed in deep aubergine, turquoise, and flambe.
Jianyang
Fujian Province
Home of the Jian zhan (hare's fur / oil spot) tea bowl. Iron-rich glazes crystallize in the kiln into patterns resembling fur, stars, and galaxies.
Ruzhou
Henan Province
Ru ware — the rarest of all Song ceramics, with fewer than 100 known surviving pieces. Its sky-blue glaze contains microscopic bubbles that scatter light like a cloudless dawn.
Liling
Hunan Province
Underglaze polychrome specialists. Liling's five-color underglaze technique paints directly onto the bisque body before glazing, locking pigment beneath glass.
Yuzhou
Henan Province
Jun ware birthplace. Copper reduction firing produces the famous "Jun purple" and "moon white" — glazes that flow and pool in unpredictable, painterly ways.
Yaozhou
Shaanxi Province
Carved celadon tradition. Yaozhou artisans incise peony, lotus, and waves into leather-hard clay before applying olive-green glaze, creating depth through shadow.
Ding
Hebei Province
The white-ware kiln of the Northern Song court. Ding porcelain is fired upside-down on saggar rims, leaving an unglazed mouth rim often bound in gold or silver.
Zibo
Shandong Province
A versatile kiln center blending northern and southern influences. Known for painted earthenware, crystalline glazes, and innovative contemporary ceramic art.
Chapter III

A Thousand Years
of Fire

The timeline of Chinese porcelain is the timeline of human civilization — traced in clay.

Tang Dynasty
618–907 CE

The crucible. Tang potters achieved the first true high-fired porcelain — translucent, resonant, vitrified. Celadon and white wares flowed along the Silk Road to Abbasid caliphs and Byzantine merchants. The word "china" was born here, derived from the Qin dynasty and attached forever to this luminous material.

Tang Dynasty Celadon Vessel
Song Dynasty Ru Ware Bowl

Song Dynasty
960–1279 CE

The golden age. Five Great Kilns — Ru, Guan, Ge, Ding, Jun — defined an aesthetic of restraint, monochrome elegance, and glaze as the primary artistic medium. Song ceramics are considered by many scholars to be the highest achievement in the history of pottery. Crackle glazes, hare's fur, and oil-spot effects pushed kiln chemistry to its limits.

Yuan & Ming Dynasties
1271–1644 CE

The global era. Jingdezhen emerged as the undisputed porcelain capital, supplying cobalt blue-and-white wares to the courts of Persia, the mosques of Istanbul, and the palaces of Europe. The dragon kilns of Jingdezhen stretched over 60 meters, firing tens of thousands of pieces in a single cycle. Export porcelain became China's first global brand.

Ming Blue-and-White Vase
Contemporary Kiln Workshop

Today
21st Century

The living tradition. China's twelve major kiln sites are recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage, with master artisans designated as Living National Treasures. Ancient techniques — reduction firing, crystalline glazing, copper-red underglazing — are preserved not in museums but in active workshops where the next generation trains under masters. INFINITE TOMATO connects these workshops directly to the world.

Chapter IV

The Process

From raw earth to luminous vessel — every piece in our collection passes through at least 72 hands.

01

Clay Preparation

Raw kaolin, petuntse, and quartz are washed, weathered for months, then kneaded by foot to remove every air bubble. A single trapped pocket can shatter a piece at 1,300°C.

02

Forming

The potter's wheel or hand-building shapes the body. Throwing a large vase can take days of incremental work — raise, dry, raise again. Precision is measured in fractions of a millimeter.

03

Trimming & Finishing

Leather-hard clay is turned on the wheel to carve the foot ring, thin the walls, and refine the profile. Surface textures — ribbing, fluting, carving — are applied at this stage.

04

Bisque Firing

The first firing, at approximately 900°C, drives out chemically bound water and hardens the body enough to accept glaze. The piece emerges porous, chalky, and resonant when tapped.

05

Glazing

Liquid glaze — a suspension of silica, fluxes, and metal oxides — is applied by dipping, pouring, or spraying. The raw glaze coat looks nothing like the final result; the true color emerges only in fire.

06

Glaze Firing

The transformative moment. At 1,200–1,400°C, silica melts into glass, metal oxides bloom into color, and crystalline structures nucleate within the glaze layer. The kiln is cooled over days — too fast, and thermal shock destroys everything.

Chapter V

The Collection

3,185 pieces. Four categories. Infinite stories.

Our collection is not curated — it is gathered. We travel to each kiln site, sit with the masters, and select pieces that speak. No algorithm, no trend report. Just the resonance of something made well.

Tea sets form the heart of the collection: gaiwans, fairness pitchers, tasting cups, and full gongfu trays. Each set is matched — pot, pitcher, and cups from the same batch of clay, glazed identically, fired together. This guarantees thermal compatibility and aesthetic harmony.

Vases range from palm-sized bud vessels to floor-standing urns. Glaze techniques include Jun-ware copper flambe, Longquan celadon, Dehua Blanc de Chine, Jianyang hare's fur, Ru-ware crackled sky-blue, and crystalline glazes that grow mineral flowers inside the glass layer.

Tableware brings heritage to the everyday: dinner plates glazed in Song-dynasty celadon, rice bowls with famille rose peony borders, and teapots that would not be out of place in a Qing scholar's studio. Functional, beautiful, dishwasher-safe — yes, really.

Shiwan figurative sculpture occupies a category of its own: ceramic figures of sages, poets, and everyday people, modeled with remarkable expressiveness and glazed in the deep, complex colors unique to the Shiwan tradition.

Browse the complete collection →

Chapter VI

The Masters

Behind every piece is a signature. These are the hands that carry a thousand years forward.

Master Portrait

Chen Xiuwen

Jingdezhen Kiln · 37 Years

Third-generation qinghua painter. Master Chen's cobalt brushwork carries the weight of Ming-dynasty draftsmanship — each stroke a single breath, no corrections possible once pigment meets bisque.

Master Portrait

Lin Meixiang

Dehua Kiln · 29 Years

Blanc de Chine sculptor. Her Guanyin figures are collected by temples and museums across Asia. She works exclusively with Dehua's local ivory-white clay, which she describes as "carving in solidified moonlight."

Master Portrait

Zhou Tianlong

Yixing Kiln · 41 Years

Zisha master and National Intangible Heritage bearer. His teapots are slab-built rather than wheel-thrown — a technique requiring absolute precision — and seasoned with decades of personal tea drinking.

Master Portrait

Wang Shuqin

Longquan Kiln · 33 Years

Celadon glaze researcher. She has revived three lost Song-dynasty glaze formulas — powder-green, plum-green, and the elusive "sky-after-rain" — through decades of trial kiln loads and chemical analysis.

Master Portrait

Huang Weiguo

Shiwan Kiln · 45 Years

Figurative sculpture master. His portrayals of Tang-dynasty poets and folk heroes are instantly recognizable for their animated expressions and the deep, glossy aubergine glazes that pool in the creases of their robes.

Master Portrait

Liu Fang

Junyao / Yuzhou Kiln · 25 Years

Copper-red specialist. Jun-ware glazes are notoriously unpredictable — copper volatilizes unpredictably in the kiln atmosphere. Master Liu's success rate of 60% is considered exceptional; each surviving piece is a statistical miracle.