Chinese tea · gold bezel, green enamel
The dial is filled with leaf
Thirty-four Chinese teas set into a fluted gold bezel: a green enamel ring, teaware pictograms where the hour batons should be, and gold caps with full tone marks below.
Chinese tea · gold bezel, green enamel
Thirty-four Chinese teas set into a fluted gold bezel: a green enamel ring, teaware pictograms where the hour batons should be, and gold caps with full tone marks below.
3 teas · 3 categories
A dial is an instrument for reading time, and tea is almost entirely a question of time: the day it was picked, the minutes it was fired, the years a pu-erh has been sitting. Putting the leaf where the dial face should be makes that the subject instead of an afterthought. The hour batons are replaced by a gaiwan, a teapot, a cup and a thermometer, because those are the actual steps of a timed brew and they belong on the ring rather than in a paragraph. Gold and dark green are used as a frame, never over the leaf, so a pale spring green and a black-gold pu-erh both stay their own colour at the centre. The machined textures — fluting, guilloché, minute ticks — are all cut rather than printed, which keeps the ornament structural. Pinyin is set with full tone marks, because a name is a word before it is a mark. Nothing in the layout says the tea is expensive; the case says it was made carefully, which is a different claim.