Chinese tea · silk square, gold line
The tea road, drawn as a silk square
Thirty-four Chinese teas set into scarf panels: an orange border, a cream field, a frame of bits and chain in fine gold line, and pack horses drawn behind the leaf.
Chinese tea · silk square, gold line
Thirty-four Chinese teas set into scarf panels: an orange border, a cream field, a frame of bits and chain in fine gold line, and pack horses drawn behind the leaf.
3 teas · 3 categories
The scarf square is a closed format: a border, a frame, a centre, and every element has to earn its place inside a fixed edge. Tea suits it because the trade that moved these leaves ran on horses for centuries, along the road from Yunnan and Sichuan into Tibet, with the cakes strapped into bundles exactly as drawn here. So the bits, chains and buckled straps in the frame are not borrowed luxury signals; they are the equipment that carried the goods. Fine gold engraving is used for everything drawn, and photography only for the leaf, which keeps the two registers separate and stops the panel becoming a collage. Orange holds the outer border because it is the loudest thing in the composition and it has to stay outside the field where the tea is judged. The white version proves the frame can carry the panel on its own, with the leaf itself hung as the fringe.