Chinese tea · blackletter, wire, one red
Wire around the leaf, blackletter over it
Thirty-four Chinese teas printed as bootleg gear — gothic caps arced top and bottom, a barbed wire ring, one sprayed red, and a fortress on the horizon.
Chinese tea · blackletter, wire, one red
Thirty-four Chinese teas printed as bootleg gear — gothic caps arced top and bottom, a barbed wire ring, one sprayed red, and a fortress on the horizon.
8 teas · 5 categories
Everything in this frame is a boundary — a ring of wire, a wall of blackletter, an island with water round it — and the tea sits inside all three. That is closer to how these teas actually move than any open-field photograph: the leaf comes off a named cliff or a single county, gets pressed, sealed, stamped, and travels under someone else's mark. Two inks do the whole job, black for structure and one red for pressure, and the red is sprayed rather than printed flat so it reads as something applied after the fact. Blackletter is used at poster size because it is the one letterform that still looks like a claim rather than a label, and the condensed slogan under it holds the baseline steady. The Chinese name goes in a boxed stamp because that is where a customs mark or a factory seal would sit, and pretending it is a decorative flourish would be dishonest. On bone paper the same print becomes the retail face, and the leaf gets the arc instead of the brand.