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I am of the opinion that tea, good tea I mean, should always be accompanied by a good argument. I also remain firmly convinced that it itself must partly be the reason and urge for the conversation, and partly guide it. If we could reconstruct a sort of symposium evening I often think about which…
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A place of magnificent waterfalls, azaleas and wild peaches, the mountains background seems to give every gesture an additional majesty, a primordial dignity.The small mud-walled houses of Y Tý stand in the green and golden colors of the rice fields, offering rural nuances to that tranquility typical of the “cloudy” land, located at more than…
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Almost 20 years have passed since the declaration of Yiwu as a “Special tourist village of Yunnan”, the program which aimed to attract more and more people to a city which was growing economically at a spasmodic pace and which was obsessively trying to make its authenticity perceived. Often this intention came into conflict with…
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Giàng Pằng, it was the discovery of this village and its history, its culture and the ancestral nature of its landscapes that began what would be the focus of my attention for the last two years. If we were in other parts of the world people would be there taking photos, absorbed, writing farewell poems…
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In recent years I have repeatedly had the pleasure of trying Ba Nuo teas, it is one of the places that perhaps more than others has taught me to free myself from the “aromatic” dimension of tea and to concentrate on the sip, on the tactile sensations, on the physicality of the brew. Ba Nuo…
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I don’t think there can be any tea, any time, any sip without the people who bring with them the truth of a territory. One of the first tea maker I met was from Bameng, he worked for a factory in Mengsong and was nicknamed 小毛虫 “little caterpillar”. This name was given to him by…
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You could hear the army advancing among the ancient tea trees, the march on the wet ground through those wooden body embraced by moss interrupted the solemn silence, the metallic noises of the pots and pans being brought along and that of the rifle shells dictated the rhythm of a macabre dance.The H’Mông children looked…
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I have always loved ripe pu’er fermented in small batches, artisanal productions that made me forget those old hypertrophic factories of Menghai, with those endless expanses of concrete on which the leaves are turned over and battered with old rusty construction shovels. However, I hate many contemporary shu hyper-fermented in piles as tall as buildings,…
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Politics clouded every public and private space in China at the end of the 70s, revolutionary inspiration raged incessantly from the large squares to the alleys of the rural dimension. The Hunan we know today, a land of extraordinary teas, has seen some of the most important Chinese political figures sit at its hickory wood…
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Hiking in Fengqing it is impossible not to arrive at what is perhaps the oldest tea tree in the world after drinking liters of that Fengqing 58 which is served in every single restaurant in the prefecture. But climbing higher up, towards 2000 meters beyond the taidicha and rice fields that continue northwards, near the…
