A new criterion has been created based on the senses, the bodily experiences and the consumers’ understanding towards objects, and this actually meant that the commoners with outstanding taste and elegant lifestyles could be placed high up; meanwhile, the wealthy and powerful but senseless persons could be placed at the bottom. However, the judgments of taste and elegance were subjective. Tsao also pointed out that social relations could be developed on the basis of shared appreciation of aesthetic moments and artistic skills. The elite’s praises on the master artisans and their extraordinary taste and skills were a representation of this change. The hierarchy of senses obliterated one’s background and education, but ranked a person in accordance with his or her understanding of life and beauty. In the field of tea, these cross-class connections were even more prominent. For example, the famous commoner tea taster, Min Wenshui was highly respected by most of the scholar-officials in the Jiangnan region, and the interactions between the elite themselves and Min were recorded by many in detail. As the same as Min, several potters from Yixing also enjoyed the appreciation from the scholar-officials, and one of the most admired potters was Shi Dabin …show more content…
The first innovation on the Yixing stoneware teapot stemmed from the inscriptions. Jonathan Hay has noticed that “the artisans analogized the surface-scape to a mounted calligraphy, and shifted the contextual point of reference from the writing desk as the site of production to the display surface as the site of consumption. The labor of writing was evoked as one more thing that could be commanded or bought.” As mentioned before, there were two types of inscriptions on the teapot. The first type of the inscription, which were usually poems written by the scholar-official customers, are inscribed on the body of the teapots. The second type was the signatures of the potters, frequently appeared on the bottom of the teapot. The former type could be seen as the result of the potters’ attempts to customize the teapots for their tea-connoisseur clients; meanwhile, the latter type functioned as the identification mark under the influence of the tradition from the state-own workshops. Among some of the early works of Shi Dabin, which were found in the tombs of some scholar-official family members, the seals that inscribed “Dabin (大彬)” on the bottom were the only inscription appeared on his teapots. For example, one Dabin teapot found in a tomb of a scholar-official named Hua Shiyi (1566-1619) in