Bamboo stove

The original bamboo stove was made in China in the late 14th century. A monk named Xing Hai in the Ting Song temple on Mount Hui in Wuxi asked a travelling bamboo artisan to make him a stove on which he could boil water for tea. Surprisingly, it included bamboo to form the frame of the stove. The sides were cemented with clay and the inside walls and the ring on top were iron. It was about a foot tall, with a cylindrical top and square bottom, similar in shape to the Qian Kun (Heaven-Earth) mythological pot or a cong.

There are several paintings including a bamboo stove, amongst which are The Bamboo Stove by T'ang Yin (1470-1524) and the later Tasting Tea made from Spring Water by Chin T'ing-piao (latter half of the 18th century). Poems praising the stove were written and these were mounted on a scroll known as "The Bamboo Stove Painting Scroll".

A society called the Blue Mountain Poetry Society was founded in the late 15th century. They built a meeting hall and garden at the foot of Mt Hui and found the stove which had been lost and returned it to the temple. Early in the 17th century the stove was lost again and the temple also burned down. The scroll was found again during the reign of the Kangxi Emperor (1662-1722) and a poet from Wuxi called Gu Zhenguan had two copies of the stove made. He took these and the scrolls to Mount Hui where a new Ting Song temple was built.