Chinese tea · serials, stencils, worn ink
Every sheet carries a lot number
Thirty-four Chinese teas stamped as workshop plates in bone white and tarnished gold on black, each with its serial, lot and stock number printed alongside the leaf.
Chinese tea · serials, stencils, worn ink
Thirty-four Chinese teas stamped as workshop plates in bone white and tarnished gold on black, each with its serial, lot and stock number printed alongside the leaf.
7 teas · 5 categories
Workshop graphics are made of numbers: a spec, a lot, a batch, a year, printed because someone downstream needs them. Tea is sold the same way — the harvest, the pressing date and the lot are what separate two cakes that look identical — so the numbers here are not decoration borrowed from a garage. Dry, broken printing is kept because the ink on a real stencilled crate breaks like that, and cleaning it up would make the sheet a poster instead of a label. The palette is two inks on black, which is what a shop press can hold, and gold is used where a tea has gold buds in it. The crest is assembled from tools rather than heraldry, since everything on offer here is made by hand somewhere and then packed. Copy is stacked in three-word lines because that is as much as a stencil will take.