Chinese tea · one sheet per specimen
Every tea filed as a specimen
Thirty-four Chinese teas printed one to a card — a disc of dry leaf, a binomial, a lot number, a stamp — on paper the colour of old archive stock.
Chinese tea · one sheet per specimen
Thirty-four Chinese teas printed one to a card — a disc of dry leaf, a binomial, a lot number, a stamp — on paper the colour of old archive stock.
34 teas · 7 categories
An archive sheet has one job — hold a specimen still and say what it is — and that is close to what a tea listing has to do. So the layout gives the leaf a plain circle in the upper field, and pushes every word below a rule where it cannot compete. The register crosses, the lot code and the round stamp are not nostalgia: they are the marks that tell you a sheet belongs to a series and can be found again. Paper is the only texture allowed, which is why the ground is never white but the grey-cream of stock that has aged in a drawer. Chinese tea suits this because its differences are visible and worth recording — silver buds, curled dark strips, flat pressed blades — and a specimen sheet is built to show exactly that kind of difference. Nothing is styled to look appetising; the tea is laid out to be identified.