Every tea is filed as a colour

Why each tea is a colour first

A chip is the smallest honest unit of description: a field of colour, a code, a name, and nothing else on the card. The field is sampled from the photograph of that leaf rather than chosen by eye, so the card is a measurement and can be checked against the picture sitting on it. Chinese tea rewards this because colour is the first thing a buyer reads — the grey-green of a Longjing blade, the wet black gloss of pressed paste, the copper of golden buds — and a flat field carries colour without exaggerating it. The code under each field is a filing number for this study and not an industry reference, so nothing here should be taken as a standard. Three neighbouring tones sit under the strip because a single tea is never one colour, and the range is part of the description. The white strip keeps the same height on every card, and that is the only reason thirty-four cards can be compared at all.