Chinese tea · jacquard, contour, altitude
Read the border, then read the elevation
Thirty-four Chinese teas set on knitted jacquard between gold borders and engraved peaks, each one carrying the altitude its bushes actually grew at.
Chinese tea · jacquard, contour, altitude
Thirty-four Chinese teas set on knitted jacquard between gold borders and engraved peaks, each one carrying the altitude its bushes actually grew at.
7 teas · 5 categories
Two traditions are held together here: mountain equipment, with its contour lines and altitude marks, and folk knitwear, with borders that were woven to say where a garment came from. Both are about place, which is the one claim tea can genuinely make. Chinese tea is sold by mountain — Wuyi, Yunnan, the Xihu hills — and elevation changes the leaf in ways a tasting note can only gesture at, so an altitude bar under a name is real information. The jacquard borders frame without illustrating anything, leaving the leaf as the only photographic thing on the page. Gold and bone on near-black are the colours knitting yields at that scale, not a luxury signal. Engraved peaks are drawn rather than photographed, so nobody mistakes the setting for a claim about a particular farm.