Chinese tea · packed for travel
Tea photographed inside the trunk
Thirty-four Chinese teas laid on monogram canvas and cream leather binding, with brass corners and a latch in frame. On the pale pages the same lattice survives as gold outline alone.
Chinese tea · packed for travel
Thirty-four Chinese teas laid on monogram canvas and cream leather binding, with brass corners and a latch in frame. On the pale pages the same lattice survives as gold outline alone.
3 teas · 3 categories
A trunk is the right container for this subject because tea reached most of the world inside one. Every tea here has an itinerary before it has a price — a hillside in Fujian or Yunnan, a pressing, months or decades of rest, a border — and a case with brass corners and a latch says that plainly without a word of copy. The lattice is used as a measuring field rather than as decoration: repeated at a fixed pitch behind the leaf, it gives a flat Longjing spear and a curled golden bud a common scale. On the pale pages the canvas drops away and only the gold outline remains, which is the honest version for a shop that has no claim on the trunk, and the character 茶 sits in the pattern where a monogram would. Brass, leather and one weight of gold line are the entire palette, so nothing competes with the leaf for attention. Restraint is the point: luggage is built to protect the contents, not to outshine them.