Author: wildharvestedtea

Notes from the Wrong Side of the Province: A Few Words on Jinggu, an Old Tea Merchant, and Two High-Mountain Pu’er.

If you ask many people what their favorite production area is, they’ll probably start listing off famous terroirs, Bingdao for its body, Laobanzhang for its qi, Naka for its fragrance, and some remote shack in a forgotten Yiwu village, which never hurts to name-drop. In short, a litany of names, as if it were a medical prescription for some trivial pathology to be handled with grave care. Or perhaps just another way to show how worn out the magnetic stripe on their credit card has become.

Jinggu likely won’t even cross their lips, not even by accident. This area is surrounded by mountains on three sides, an enclave where the best gardens are often inaccessible, and where the obsession with naming every single rooftop (as in Yiwu) is quickly anesthetized by a lack of roads and the even greater lack of desire to build them. Here, not even the clunky two-ton electric behemoths at the service of Western merchants can climb their way up.

I agree that vast expanses of flat land, dull stretches of agricultural functionality, are today brutally carpeted with Da Bai Cha, as in the flatlands of Wen Shan Ding. A cultivar that acts like a funerary carpet, its tea merely a collateral damage, a distillate of hardship and credit requests, with a hint of bank loan in the aftertaste. But if you start climbing and forget all that, you’ll reach over 2,000 meters at Kuzhu Shan. There, ancient trees stretch in swathes; in some spots, they’re even Teng Tiao, like in Banuo, but with a slightly different aromatic profile, less delicate, more fragrant, impactful, and mineral. Less mannered, and more Felliniesque, to put it simply.

Some time ago, I met a Pu’er expert, a merchant from Lincang whose main business revolved around the Fangcun market. I asked him why he thought people considered teas from Jinggu less worthy, almost like children of a lesser god, tolerated but avoided, like the uncle with a drinking problem at Christmas dinner. He was a big man, with hands the size of shovels. He stared at me for a moment, with his huge, isochoric pupils, maybe the largest I’ve seen on someone from Yunnan, wide like those of an Australian owl photographed by Joel Sartore, performing tiny mechanical micro-adjustments every time you locked eyes with him, as if missing an autofocus. He answered in monosyllables, he looked like someone who read Anna Karenina just to root for Vronsky. He smiled too, but it seemed like his facial muscles were slightly jammed from decades of monsoon rains. And yet, he was one of the most knowledgeable people on Pu’er I’ve met.

It took him a while, then he said something, I don’t quite remember what. I was too busy noticing the irrelevant details I’d later include in this article. But the meaning behind his cocktail of anthropology and Moutai was clear: Jinggu was guilty of not being immediate enough. Too real, too unavailable. Add to that the fact that the era when people chased uniqueness has been over for a couple of decades. They discovered the villages of Yiwu, Laobanzhang, Bingdao, a few others in between, and the punch bowl quickly ran dry. Because, you see, he said, the markets want exclusivity. The consumers who arrive in polished shoes at the edge of the forest, who slip on plastic sandals before posing in front of an ancient tree, are looking for tea like they’re looking for sushi in Berlin.

And he was right. Some want only the illusion of a mysterious narrative, not the truth of the land. They prefer a tea that behaves like a cool, aloof actor, properly trained to play the silent type, the tormented one, the aged-in-a-hut-with-a-hidden-past role, rather than someone, or something, that simply tastes like what it is.

Jinggu teas aren’t for complexity maniacs. They’re rather blunt, direct, break through your guard with a few solid punches, enveloping you in sweetness and asserting themselves through their huigan and bodily sensation.

In the Kuzhu and Tang Fang Liang Zi areas, you’ll find real forest coverage where tea is harvested, like some portion of Yiwu, the northwestern edges of Laos and Vietnam, or the forested zones of Guogan in Myanmar. Here, the trees grow close to and inside the forest. The soil is clay-based with a good amount of rock, confirming the tea’s mineral and sweet character. The plants are spaced well apart, and younger trees are left to grow naturally. You won’t see any drastic pruning, only containment cuts.

It’s a complex terroir. In one cup, you’ll think you’ve stumbled into Jingmai. Drive twenty kilometers and drink again, you might swear you’re tasting Yiwu. Walk another ten, parched and hopeful, and you’ll find bitter cultivars whose huigan is so forceful, so magnetic, it makes some Bulang teas feel like passive-aggressive outbursts by comparison.

Here, like in Laoman’e, bitter and sweet varietals sometimes coexist in the same natural amphitheater. The former, known as kucha, often dominates the more remote slopes, but it’s never overwhelmingly bitter, never out of place or chaotic. It soon turns its cheek to a wild sweetness, like a fist on the table that prepares the caress. If the sweet variety is a well-composed, harmonic melody, the bitter one is drama and catharsis, leaving every door open for further development. These are teas that, even years later, remain an enigma. Tasting them again over time is like revisiting a neighborhood in daylight where you partied in the night before. You barely recognize it, and the sunlight seems to restore a grace you previously failed to notice.

In both cases, what stands out is an oily, umami-like sip and a genuine, full-bodied chaqi, it feels like it thins your tissues, filling your chest and pushing every muscle fiber up against your skin. A tea with a soul that doesn’t scream, but also doesn’t compromise. A tea you don’t expect, and which, especially in the case of ancient trees, hasn’t been tamed to soften its impact.

Southwest of Jinggu Town lies Jiu Tai Po, one of the most expensive and coveted areas, graced with the elegance of something that knows how to stay hidden. Few signs, no selfie points, no desire to be disturbed more than necessary. The village itself, small and vaguely adrift in agricultural amniotism, has little tea directly surrounding it; most of it is in the forest zone, along the ridges or on the opposite slopes. Road access is practically nonexistent, and like Guafengzhai, it takes hours of hiking to reach the tea trees. These aren’t roads for people in Italian leather shoes, and a camo cap won’t get you to the top. The landscape feels like a James Cameron set, shot with Kubrick’s cinematography and directed by a mood-swinging park ranger. There, the leaves aren’t picked by good boys, but by madmen, neurotics howling at the moon, yelling into the western wind, and probably monks armed with faith and an unearthly amount of patience. Climbing up there feels like trying to earn a glance from Maria Callas, flailing pathetically to grasp the corner of her eye, she ignores you, and you thank her anyway.

In recent years, Jinggu has had its big moments, times when even the cynics had to admit that yes, even from those mountains often relegated to Act Two of the Pu’er narrative, something remarkable could emerge. Like the Pu’er from Tang Fang Liang Zi by Farmer Leaf, especially the single tree series that reads like an elegant lithograph set by De Chirico; the 2017 Chawangdi or the 2016 You Shang from Chawang Shop, perhaps among the Western forerunners of Jinggu’s nouvelle vague, to the 2007 Shang Pin by Xi Zi Hao or the old relics from Changtai, old-school, decadent, like an old house with silk on the walls, with the scent of leather and creaking parquet.

But today, I’ll focus on two other excellent sheng Pu’er by Thés Terre de Ciel, both from old-ancient trees.

TdC Spring 2024 Xiao Jinggu Puerh des Cimes

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Pu’er of Jinggu, for their remoteness, their distance from the inflated rhetoric about the primordial nature of its landscapes, for from the market wars over taste profiles and terroir cred. Jinggu teas owe nothing to expectation; they answer only to themselves.

This is one of those teas. The kind with no prefabricated image, no guiding archetype. Nothing to anchor your imagination, no Muse whispering interpretation in your ear, as Hesiod might have hoped. Just you and the leaf. No crib sheet. No narrative. Only the moment.

The leaves are twisted, dark green. The sip is viscous, with a round, sticky umami reminiscent of chicken broth from a market stall in Chongqing. There’s a sweetness too, unopposed and undistracted, a sensory monologue rich in subtext. The huigan lays itself across the tongue like a seamless silk blanket. Bitterness exits the discussion early.

The Qi is delicate, but it moves under your skin, subtly shifting your posture, your pace, your pulse. The salivation it provokes becomes a kind of gustatory capital. The sensation is almost organic-minimalist, like an alabaster vase with no sharp edges, revealing more intentions than it cares to admit. The intensity of the peach note approaches something like an orchestral delirium, building in a near-psychedelic crescendo, and that out-of-the-ordinary umami makes it feel less like a beverage, and more like a pre-dessert at L’Arpège.

TdC Spring 2023 Kuzhu Shan

This Pu’er from Kuzhu Shan seems like it emerged straight out of a
William Morris wallpaper, drawn after two glasses of fine Vin Jaune. Alienated, eclectic, remote, saturated with organic vitality. The dry leaves exude hints of light tropical fruit, citrus, and wildflowers. As expected, this is not a tea that lingers in a labyrinthine dimension of complexity, but that’s not the terrain where Kuzhu teas show their hand.

The true opera magna takes place in the mouth, which becomes the theater for a clash and debate between a pronounced yet agreeable bitterness and a sweetness that follows quickly, almost antithetical to it. It’s a generative tension that drives this medium-bodied sip to evolve, to layer itself, each new sensory stratum tearing apart, cannibalizing the one laid down before it.

The tasting unfolds as a kind of sensorial acceleration, like a Baz Luhrmann film, abrupt cuts, frenetic pacing, a hyperactive montage, leading to a terribly refreshing, surreal sensation with an unmistakable note of tonic water.

It’s a Gin & Tonic stripped of its damnation, as Nick Carraway might say while struggling with his addiction. This is a vividly alive liquid, whose finish is so enduring it seems pointless to measure. It unwinds slowly on notes of ginger beer, candied lemon peel, and rhubarb, while your tongue’s receptors are still stunned by the mineral lash it dealt twenty minutes earlier.

Usually, when I drink a Pu’er, I think about its aging potential, its price-to-quality ratio, I imagine derivatives and equations, risk and return curves, asking myself whether it’s better to keep it for the medium or long term. I make a lot of projections, hypotheses, even metaphysical guesses.

But the truth is, this is one of the few teas where none of that matters. I drink it because it’s simply really good. Whether it lasts twenty years or disappears in two days, for once, I really don’t care.

Left: 2023 Kuzhu Shan

Right: 2024 Xiao Jinggu

10 July 2025
Rediscovering Forgotten Ceramics: A Late Edo Imari Plate and the Survival of Beauty

For some time now, I’ve been searching for old, uncelebrated, forgotten ceramics, those hidden in the attics of memory, which for some reason have never received the appreciation they deserve. Western and Eastern ceramics alike, which could rediscover their aesthetic essence by reconfiguring their functionality, taking part in the act of the tea ceremony, even in its informal variations, finding a new stage on which to perform once more.

There is an endless variety of maiolica from Caltagirone, Faenza, Deruta, Vietri; glazed ceramics and porcelain from Capodimonte, or porcelain from Venice and Doccia, which could easily harmonize with this practice. They are not merely objects, but fragments of a forgotten discourse, crafted by visionary masters who impressed upon ceramics a certain Oriental sensibility, without ever sacrificing tradition.

I believe the same is true for many regions of the Far East take, for instance, Arita ceramics: symbols of memoryless porcelain, cupboard-bound relics, victims of that senseless Western compulsion to hang plates on walls in a misplaced pursuit of verticality. They became simulacra of the European bourgeoisie, who ravenously hunted down ‘chinoiseries’ without often asking what it was they truly held in their hands. Absurdly, those hands never truly held them at all, since the objects were bought and placed somewhere as mere installations, losing the tactility that is vital to the ceramic experience.

I have recently recovered this Imari plate, one that, by some stroke of fate, had eluded the fetishism of early orientalists and exoticism-hunters of the last century. It dates to late Edo, probably to the Bakumatsu period, when Japan was witnessing the twilight of a civilization that had reached the heights of formal refinement, just before the dawn of the Meiji era. With the easing of foreign policy tensions, Imari porcelain quickly found its way into the gilded interiors of the West, winning over the Victorian era with its chromatic flamboyance and a kind of baroque opulence.

This plate reveals the traditional essence of Arita porcelain: consistent with its era are its hard-paste composition, its floral patterns, arabesques, and phytomorphic motifs which, along with the linear strokes form the typical centripetal composition. The use of color evokes the Nabeshima style without betraying the tripartite chromatic scheme: The dominance of underglaze cobalt blue and iron red, applied in a delicate third firing, is rendered through a contracted, almost restrained brushwork, in stark contrast to the broader, more relaxed strokes usually expected.

However, unlike many later Imari pieces which, in their object-show essence, still cry out ‘I am Japan’ while whispering ‘buy me please’, this plate betrays that schematic sobriety and export-bound fate, instead offering a work that is more instinctive, more raw, and at times childlike. It does not conform to the contrived rhetoric of ‘imperfection’; rather, in my view, it unveils a kind of emotive gestural truth, which, along with the worn glaze and the makeshift repair, reanimates the idea of a fading beauty, so near to the Japanese mindset.

The West, so deeply enamored with chiaroscuro, with play of light, with order and meaning, has often overlooked more bidimensional, introverted, and seemingly naïve forms. This is a plate that ‘tells a story’, as Longhi might say, but here, it rises up, grows loud, proclaiming ‘I am the East the West never truly understood.’

Many Japanese masters of the 19th century experimented without the obsessive pursuit of serial perfection. They created without rigid boundaries, like thoughts left to mature. They stood apart from the Tokoname factory mentality, from the tyranny of repetition and the logic of hourly production.

I am convinced of its beauty, without forcibly seeking it, just as I am resolute in saying this plate is a true witness of its age, in its instinct, in its excess, it recalls the time of antique taste, having paid the price with the loss of its vitreous glaze, it has survived the consumerist years of mass-exported, mechanized works and commissioned art. This is a work that demands to be lived and explored in its materiality. And in doing so, it reconnects us to a past in which beauty could be functional, yet functionality was not a limitation. It is a survivor of artisanal vitality, erudite and refined, which, even when facing its artistic senescence, ensures that the clumsiness of its gesture does not embarrass, but rather allows a sincere and almost moving grace to emerge.

20 June 2025
Mengsong and the Anatomy of a Relentless Huigan. TdC Sanmai Village Danzhu Sheng Pu’er Spring 2024

In Sanmai, the harvest embodies collective power, it remains there, sedimented, like the slow burn of an inexhaustible cultural fire. It reemerges in the ritual act, with the tension that grows as the air’s humidity rises, escalating like a migraine that starts at the base of the skull and radiates to the eyes. Hope mingles with the fear that the rain might arrive at the wrong moment, transforming the river into a clay demon and the crumbling mountain into an army of rock.

Here, Mengsong seems to speak through the very stones of the houses. And what it says is not just a verb numbed by modernity, but an echo that comes from far away, from a larger world, perhaps lost, but still alive in the people. It kindles itself on the walls, becomes flesh, becomes identity. The fragile power of its tea is like the fire in Ella Fitzgerald’s voice resonating in the aorta. You cannot ignore it.

These are not odes nor exercises in writing. This is ground zero of the attempt to understand. To truly come into contact with a tea that hides in sensory detail, that, like its land, wears you down and demands understanding at the edges of perception.

This danzhu from Thés Terre de Ciel is a truly unexpected tea, unsettling in some respects. We are often accustomed to teas from Naka, Benglong, Bameng, with their floral, sometimes fruity, gentle characters. But Sanmai doesn’t play with gloves on. It is a clean, precise, yet powerful tea. The Qi is profoundly forest-like, dense, almost physical; it seems to influence every mechanoreceptor. You feel it in your hands, your legs, your stomach. It seeps into the nerve plexuses, as if the body were enhancing the perception of every distal extremity, of each of its boundaries.

The huigan is long, incessant. It lingers. The bitterness is there, but it doesn’t last. It retreats quickly, making way for a mineral, almost effervescent, electric sensation that settles on the sides of the tongue, along with a sweetness that makes no compromises. Salivation is continuous, rhythmic, like waves that come without pause. Like the crowd at Glastonbury, a constant flow. Every infusion up to the twelfth is a tactile theater, alive, dense, full. No drop, no faltering.

13 June 2025
The Design of Ephemeral Grace – Seven Essence 2025 Spring Quiescence

Quiescence is the child of temptation, a tea that crashes in like Dean Moriarty’s wild, unhinged laughter, a tea that halts time, that fills empty spaces with the substance of life.
It’s a spring harvest from cultivar B157, one of those rare works that appear once every four springs, refusing to exist in reflections, in mirrors, in repetition.

The wet leaves smell of frangipani and vanilla, laced with the almost milky notes typical of Taiwanese oolongs. It feels like it fell from a Liberty canvas, dried in the dawn sun of Los Angeles, back when the light was still golden and the air almost liquid.

It’s a hymn to creative impulse, to those destined to vanish, leaving behind only a trace, like perfume on a pillow, or a copy of Les Fleurs du mal forgotten on a veneered nightstand, underlined, underlined everywhere.

The sip is soft, pliant, sweet. It leaves a creamy, floral, almost cosmetic film on the tongue. You can sense the intent, the effort to craft an exceptional tea, every sharp edge softened like a minimalist organic vase. Its aromatic texture feels woven through an analytical, obsessive, surgical search for sensation.

Sweet notes surface, mango custard, whipped cream, a whisper of osmanthus water. It’s the ultrasound of a happy childhood memory, evaporating into something denser, more designed.
It lingers in the mouth, clinging to the palate, with a hauntingly familiar aftertaste of strawberry cream.

There’s a quiet sense of luxury in all of this.
It’s like stepping into a room decorated only in pale gold and French velvet, with bottles of Champagne scattered across the floor, where nothing is left to chance, and even the dust participates in the choreography.

It’s a layered, intentional experience. A reminder that 2025 is a truly remarkable year for Darjeeling.

29 May 2025
The Changing Mountains – Part 2: Economic Perspectives of Traditional Architecture

The question most of you are probably asking after the philosophical and ideological discourse of the first part is: how important can the implementation of a system based on rural architecture be in economic terms?

Quite frankly, I am not an expert in land finance, nor do I wish to replace those who work in that field. I’m a food technologist: I work with food, I analyze problems and find solutions related to it. By nature, I tend to understand why mechanisms jam and how to intervene to restore their proper function. So what follows is an analysis based on much of the literature I’ve explored over the past few years, not professionally, but driven by a genuine desire to understand and a deep personal curiosity. I’ve never liked pointing out problems and then standing back while others fix them, even when I had no idea where to start to piece things together. That’s why you won’t find ready-made solutions here, but rather some reference points for building your own awareness, an awareness that can only grow.

Before understanding how vital it is to support rural architecture and safeguard architectural cultural heritage, we must grasp how important the real estate market is for China’s economic growth.

China’s economic development has always followed a dual-track system. Without public housing, no “transformation” would have been feasible or even conceivable. In this model, the tracks are not parallel but sequential: public housing comes first, followed by the market. As a result, the health of the second depends entirely on the first. This is the main difference between China and Singapore, or China and the rest of the world and it explains why housing policy has had such a strong impact in China. It also helps us understand how the greatest forms of resilience, whether in the face of internal crises or external shocks, were triggered by shifts in the central government’s approach to real estate. First in 1990, with the provisional regulation regarding the granting and transfer of state land-use rights in urban areas; then the 1998 housing reform that allowed a huge number of families to acquire necessary goods, including homes, laying the foundations for the current urban middle class. Finally, the pre-2008 policies that prevented China from being swallowed up by the global financial crisis, such as the mandatory implementation of the “831” policy on land sold through public bidding, which brought hundreds of billions of RMB in land revenues to the central and local governments in just a few years.

The potential economic benefits of preserving rural ecology and traditional building go beyond increasing real estate value, with a possible 15–25% per-square-meter increase in value (Prince’s Foundation). Neighborhoods designed with traditional planning approaches also tend to maintain or increase in value during times of crisis (New Urbanism Report).

We know that China is currently experiencing a serious real estate crash. Do you remember an old article I wrote about the Pu’er tea price crisis this past spring? There might be a connection, and I’ll briefly get to the point.

The link between China’s real estate crisis and the issue of rural architecture and place-based value, though seemingly distant, is actually a deep and structural connection. It touches the very foundations of the economy, society and the relationship between built space and capital. The key lies in how value is created through space. Modern China built its economic miracle on the urban real estate market; now, to overcome the crisis, it must find a new paradigm for value creation, one that could partially come from rural areas. To be clear, real estate speculation is a necessary evil*, albeit one that should be pursued with containment logic. But in rural contexts, this is often not the core issue.

In the article mentioned earlier, I highlighted some potential dangers generated by unchecked price speculation in the Pu’er market, such as a chain of farmer defaults that could cause banks and lenders to restrict credit in an effort to avoid adverse selection (i.e. funding risky projects). That said, there is often a mistaken perception that the essence of real estate lies solely in the buying and selling of land and homes. In reality, the core function of the sector is not so much direct investment, but its ability to generate credit. Any economic initiative can obtain financing if supported by adequate cash flows (as has been the case with Pu’er-related activities over the past two decades); however, the actual ability to secure capital largely depends on having tangible collateral. In this context, real estate plays a crucial role as an asset suitable to serve as a guarantee. Therefore, the fundamental function of the real estate market is to attribute value to real assets and give them liquidity, making them effective tools for activating financial circuits. Equipping villages with targeted credit logic, cultural rootedness, and non-speculative real estate enhancement can thus be a form of resilience in less prosperous times.

We also know that tourism in well-preserved rural Chinese villages (e.g., Hongcun, Xidi, Zhouzhuang, as well as traditional urban contexts in Yunnan such as Wengji, Nuogan, Shaxi) has led to significant increases in local GDP (China Statistical Yearbook, 2023). The use of native raw materials promotes agricultural biodiversity and increases productivity in mixed systems (agroforestry), while boosting employment in traditional crafts, if supported by local policies that are decoupled from the tea market. All of this fits perfectly within the problematic context of regions heavily reliant on a single crop, where workers often lack transferable skills and economic diversification is limited. When only one productive asset exists (like Pu’er), price volatility threatens not just income but also families’ access to credit, potentially leading to systemic financial exclusion. In this sense, rural architecture represents a form of territorial capital that generates tangible, enduring value, fostering access to local microcredit, creating jobs in restoration, craftsmanship, and tourism, and supporting integrated development. It serves as a catalyst for growth that respects cultural identity without exploiting or commercializing it.

*
Speculation is a necessary evil: to increase the housing supply, real estate must be a profitable investment and that means accepting a certain level of speculation: those who build or buy to resell must earn a profit. Also, there is a need to make real estate more liquid, in a sense, it must become a tradable asset and form of collateral. It doesn’t matter whether housing prices are soaring or steadily increasing; what matters is that there’s a sufficient perception of that trend. Without this logic, no one would invest in housing on a large scale. If speculation is curbed too strictly (to protect the right to housing), it disincentivizes investment in the real estate sector. As a result, less capital is deployed, construction slows, employment drops and the economy suffers. Whether the State or the market seeks to ensure housing for all, it often does so through financial instruments like incentives, mortgages, subsidies, market liberalization or low interest rates. This leads to a dilemma: the more accessible you try to make housing, the more you expose it to speculative forces. Therefore, a certain degree of speculation must be acknowledged and managed but not entirely eliminated, otherwise the system risks coming to a standstill. And that is one of the key issues behind China’s current real estate short-circuit.

22 May 2025
The Changing Mountains – Part 1: How High Stakes Corrupt Authenticity

Cities, villages, neighborhoods as we have inherited them through the centuries are not mere institutions or simple names that evoke order and schematic boundaries. Rather, they are places that preserve the way of life of a civilization. In them, we experience time, space, and relationships with others, the “others” being women and men, once strangers to one another, who built spaces in which to live peacefully. These places are symbols of human relationships, compromises, unwritten laws and oral traditions, of evolution and change experienced side by side. Through architecture, rituals and religions survive. Not by chance, the word religion derives from relegere, to take note. Every cultural practice demands that attentiveness which architecture can teach. Over time, it has become a vehicle of proportion, memory, order, boundary, teachings on the use of light, shelter from the darkest nights, place of muffled sounds, thresholds and stairways that not only lead but instruct.

Rural architecture approaches the concept of classical architecture, as it is not merely a form of building that blindly pursues the essential functions of a structure, but rather a symbol of growth and the transitional phases imposed by history on a place’s inhabitants, an architecture that has grown over the centuries through inner coherence. Think of the Dai houses, with their classic two-story layout: living spaces and bedrooms on the upper floor, animals and farming tools on the ground floor. Roofs made of local stone or rice straw, and the use of wood from surrounding forests. These features do not simply create a picturesque image for an ethnographic reportage, but intelligent responses to a specific context.

This design ideology is not concerned with “looking pretty”: it is necessary, because it arises from a balance between nature, function, and humanity. In this sense, it is a fulfilled manifestation of what Frank Lloyd Wright called organic architecture, a principle he tirelessly sought to establish across Europe and America throughout the 20th century. What Western universities were trying to rediscover, Yunnan, and China as a whole, already had right before their eyes and under their feet. But as so often happens in the history of civilizations, the arrival of wealth and the imitation of foreign models shatter this ancient balance.

With the influx of money from the tea market, some villages changed their appearance, resulting in the construction of alien hotels, expanses of tiles in village centers, glass towers and sterile multi-story concrete buildings rising like imitative forms of globalization and economic development. But this is nothing more than replacing a dialogue with the environment with a monologue of vanity. To blindly and stubbornly surrender to this process is an act of desensitization to one’s own history. This is how the harmony between built and natural environments is dismantled, rendering a particular village into a generic, interchangeable place.

To those who accuse me of being a fanatical dreamer, just as Léon Krier was branded a nostalgic visionary, I respond that traditional architecture holds forms and anatomies capable of reflecting truly human interests, more so than modern architecture. Including economic interests.

Buildings, houses, factories, temples, everything in rural architecture responds to truth and real use, but not in a merely utilitarian sense. Today, modernist architectural projects are not designed to be inhabited, but merely passed through, they are meant to represent a transient place. They are theatrical props in an urban performance, with no reference to a broader meaning, a meaning that can reside even in the humblest dwelling. Modern buildings are often imposing, expensive, designed to elicit hollow opinions from critics with numbed vocabularies, who otherwise might look past them and judge them as they deserve.

And so Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt is known as “the pregnant oyster,” the UN building in New York as “the radiator,” Di Salvo’s brutalist buildings in Scampia, Naples as “the sails,” while for the monstrosity of Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Center, they didn’t even bother, just calling it by the name of the neighborhood it was dumped into. While classical forms represent agreements handed down through generations and originate from centuries of consensus, modernist ones require nicknames to identify themselves in their forced attempt to exist solely for a purpose, that of containment, but in iconic form. According to Krier, this need to nickname is nothing but an entry into the category of kitsch: the attempt, by an object devoid of authenticity, to obtain a label that justifies its existence, that makes it “mean” something. It is the staging of a rootless structure, forcibly grafted into a context to which it is alien, like a despised ex who, after years of silence, suddenly shows up, with unwelcome emotional exhibitionism, at your mother’s birthday party.

In this way, what is gained is not just improved material conditions, if that even occurs, but also the domestication of the sense of belonging: the institution of a “government of smoothness,” where every surface is polished, glossy, frictionless, where nothing invites you to stay. And really, why stay, if nothing is made to last and bear witness anymore and your land is transformed into just another urban cluster like all the others?

Let it be clear: it is impossible to demand perpetual amniotic preservation. But evolution is not destruction. One can build today according to ancient criteria, using modern technologies without sacrificing harmony, symbolism, or recognizability. Gilbert Keith Chesterton wrote that “Tradition is the democracy of the dead,” and that is essentially true. Abandoning it is not freedom, it is an amputation of collective memory. True modernity is that which recognizes itself as a chapter in an already begun book, not a blank page.

When we speak of rural architecture, as in the case of homes in Wengji, Shaxi or Nuogan in Yunnan, we are not referring to mere picturesque tradition. We are speaking of an organic spatial model, culturally rooted, formally legible, and humanly proportioned, one that creates value not through financial abstraction but through functional continuity (home-work-land), a form of identity authenticity (cultural and symbolic value of place), constructive ecology (local materials and techniques), and a lasting attractiveness much more resilient to external shocks (for tourism, craftsmanship, and quality agriculture).

Architecture and urban development must preserve the visible memory of a cultural identity, and to defend these principles is not conservatism, but the ecology of identity.

Note: The photo was taken by Steve Shafer

19 May 2025
First Flush, Final Breath: Drinking the Last of the Muses. Seven Essence 2025 FF Darjeeling Muse

At a time when humanity still seemed willing to believe in something beyond the mere surface of things, the Muses sat upon Mount Parnassus. It was an age when people were aware that art was something more than just a string of provocations with fluctuating budgets, something more than what you can now sort “from most to least expensive”. The nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne guided the hands of painters; their voices stirred the blood that fed the cante jondo, urged demons to move T-Bone Walker’s left hand just a little more, whispered the six sonatas for violin and harpsichord into the ear of Vienna’s young prodigy. Today, I fear they no longer sit anywhere. Presumably locked away in some post-industrial loft in Milan, gagged with tape labeled “reconstructed identity” or some other bullshit straight out of the Damien Hirst playbook.

Calliope, the one who once conversed with Cesare Pavese, has now ceded her place to seventeen seasons of some televised sobfest. Euterpe, on the other hand, is in despair, seeing a world that once resonated with the sublime tones of Giuditta Pasta now wander aimlessly with earbuds in, listening to some immersive composting sound experience, something for those who believe that rhythm is a new form of urban mysticism. Suffering is no longer catharsis, but mere reportage. Tragedy has become a type of therapy. Art is now a vehicle for delivering yet another saccharine confession that nobody asked for. The Muses have not been imprisoned by the market, but by contemporary philosophy itself, which has always denied their necessity.

And yet, now and then, one of them escapes. And when that happens, a Christone Ingram appears. Or a Jordan Casteel. Or a Jacopo Cardillo. Someone who doesn’t need to prove that their kind of expression deserves a higher, transcendent status, because people don’t need to convince themselves that it does. They simply know it. Instinctively. No massively inflated price tag is required to protect their importance, because no price would ever be enough.

Where once we invoked the austere beauty of Dreyer, or the sacred silence of Tarkovsky, today we exalt centrifugal narratives that refuse to come to any kind of conclusion, as if the unfinished were somehow more “true” than the completed. Perhaps I too am an asymptomatic carrier of this condition. I have a draft of a book sitting untouched in the upper left corner of my desktop for six months. I sometimes drink more than I should. I let Rory Gallagher depress me far too much. And I find myself sensing emotion in a throwaway work by Twombly.

Before the whisper of a Muse, before hearing the chords of Erato’s lyre move the soul, before Melpomene offers her sword to face the tragic, it now feels almost more honest to linger in the unformed, a sort of beta version of the present that will, one day, receive its necessary update. We live in an age that collects fragments. Isolated sentences. Reels. Reels of reels. Everything must appear as something short enough to scroll past, yet long enough to suggest continuation, even if that continuation never comes. And this, I believe, applies to everything in our lives.

And I believe it also applies to tea. Including the rare sparks of the extraordinary. It’s entirely possible that one of the Muses escaped into the Darjeeling region, slipping away for one spring from her confinement to the ruins of mythology, leaving strands of her robe in what this first flush has become today: the blooming of precocious talent, something you feel a desperate urge to consume, for fear that it may wither overnight.

Muse is a sublime tea, the kind I come across only once every three or four years, because evidently nature does not wish to give more than that. It’s a tea whose wet leaves smell of bison grass, soft French nougat, myrtle leaf, and mulberry gelato. At first, it seems accommodating, then it leaves the coasts of Occitania and dives into deeper waves of sweetness: guava, golden kiwi, and frangipani, lined with vegetal chords of cactus, then aloe, like in an art deco perfumery in Silver Lake. In the end, everything contracts into something foreign, citrusy. Pomelo. Sharp. Precise. Almost hostile.

In the mouth, it’s soft, intensely sweet, but anything but commonplace. The flavors point to fig, vine leaf, traces of herb butter, something vaguely liqueur-like, maybe green acorn distillate, and then birch sap. It’s not a taste. It’s an image. Then it veers. Completely, into mulberry and grape.

For anyone who believes Indian teas lack Qi, they need to try this. The sensation is stunning, abrupt like a flood of adrenaline rushing through the vena cava, like that chill running down your spine when something truly significant happens. Like all great teas, it lingers. It stays with you for hours, like a text message at 3 a.m. you wish you’d never read. You can push it through ten infusions, fifteen, but the flavor never leaves your mucosae. Muse persists, like nails tapping softly on a taut drumskin, quieter and quieter until nothing is heard anymore and the noise of the street comes through the window, and yet you know that something is still resonating in that absurd chaos.

9 May 2025
Tả Củ Tỷ & the Weight of the Mist: Aesthetics and Ontology of the Big Rice Field

With A Comparative Journey Through Two Traditional Viet Sun Sheng Pu’er

When I first saw Steve’s photos, his Vietnam, made of fiery red sunsets, emerald pastures, and motorcycles whose tire treads were mere memories, I was left hanging in a sense of emptiness, of existential incompleteness tied to never having visited those places. Looking at those shots felt like peering into a parallel world, embraced by a sort of ontological nostalgia.

The snapshots of Tả Củ Tỷ, the “Big Rice Field,” reveal the truth of a borderland world, of earth and blood, behind the major cities, whose distant lights appear like a sarcastic smile with pearl-white teeth. Then the horizon arches, growing increasingly vertical, rising further along the crumbling clay arteries, beyond the rice paddies, moments ago drained, now swollen with rain and reflecting the vastness of the sky.

Here, every tree, every tea leaf, every sensory experience is an imperfect shadow of an eternal idea. This is where one of the best Pu’er teas in Vietnam is made, loaded with a near-theological sincerity, vibrant in every vintage, soft, flowery, and endlessly mineral. The shengs of Tả Củ Tỷ are like the Rieslings of the Mosel, a form of resistance against the trials the gods impose through the elements. They express the same minerality and layered memory. But while Riesling whispers sweet notes and sings praises like a Romantic poet on a summer evening surrounded by Viennese Jugendstil, the Pu’er of Tả Củ Tỷ elegantly drags you down a muddy mule path under relentless monsoon rain. In both, there is the same sharp and ruthless beauty, but whereas the Mosel wines evoke the rarefied skies of Chagall, suspended in uncorrupted blue, in Tả Củ Tỷ the image offers no redemption, it demands confrontation. Time here doesn’t pass, it presses. The landscapes are those painted by Turner, but not the sublime, ethereal artist of the Dover sea, rather the feverish, visionary Turner of his final years, where light shatters into curls of shadow and smoke, and the scene dissolves into an intensified, nebulous inner reality.

The province of Lào Cai hosts a pedological diversity of rare complexity, the result of interactions between lithology, comprising metamorphic and sedimentary bedrocks, and a harsh topography shaped by steep slopes and variable altitudes ranging from the Red River’s lowlands to peaks shrouded in mist. In this living landscape, far from documentary clichés, ten major soil groups intertwine, distributed into around thirty subcategories, reflecting an extreme variety of geomorphological, climatic, and land-use conditions. In this mosaic, most fall into the categories of alluvial soils, minimally developed, fertile, fine-textured, laid across the Red River’s floodplains. As elevation rises, submontane zones host deep ferralitic soils, with aggressive pedoenvironments and reddish-brown hues. Then come humic soils on red-yellow parent rock, which inhabit the gentler slopes of the Sa Pa and Bắc Hà districts, ideal for mountain orchards and medicinal plants, the same ones that Dao grandmothers will grant you for a spider bite, heartbreak, or to recover quicker from the drunken night before. Higher still, where the air thins, the sun burns your skin, and geology shifts from academic subject to a lesson in humility, you find the brown, acidic forest soils typical of high-altitude tea forests, marked by thick organic horizons and excellent water retention, where the labor is real, marketing fades, and matter begins. The higher you go, the more essential the soil becomes, and the mountain strips you of every excess you thought you needed.

Since ancient times, the region now known as Lào Cai has been a living tapestry of peoples from the H’Mông–Dao (including Mông, Dao, and Phù Lá) and the Kra-Dai groups (including Tày and Nùng). The Phù Lá migrated from Yunnan during the waves of the 15th and 17th centuries and opened the Lào Cai–Hekou pass, a crossroads for southern Chinese merchants and Tibetan fugitives, military settlers, and Tonkinese textile makers. Salt, tea, silk, and livestock crossed gorges and cliffs towards the Red River Delta, in exchange for rice, gourds, rare spices, and La Chi cotton fabrics. The trade route stayed open for five centuries, until the war with China in 1979. Tả Củ Tỷ and the entire Bắc Hà highland area have always been a “slippery edge” of the Vietnamese empire: formally part of Đại Việt, but in practice governed by local clan leaders and traversed by cross-border trade routes. Only with the expansion of the Nguyễn dynasty and, later, the arrival of the French, did state control become more pervasive. But that’s another story.

The forests of Tả Củ Tỷ possess a mad, honest allure. The color palette feels like something conjured by a cosmic hangover, while the mist moves slowly, like cigarette smoke drifting in a closed room. Its radiance isn’t the kind choreographed by a cheerful smile or Caribbean hues, but rather the disarming kind of beauty of a woman who’s cried all night and then looks at you at dawn, bare-faced. A fleeting moment of rare grace, allowed to linger briefly in the interlude of suffering, the kind of incorruptible, visceral visual rapture that doesn’t let you lie.

These dusty clay paths have been trodden by pack leaders, smugglers, and warriors. They’ve witnessed rites of passage and the initiations of Dao and Mông shamans, the veneration and sacred songs of the Tày, and offered shelter for markets and negotiations, for secrets traded with Xôi ngũ sắc, and for boisterous jokes between bowls of Thang Cọ and glasses of rice wine.

From this thread of bare earth echoes the sound of an absolute beauty that refracts through the contingent, like a bridge between the transitory and the infinite. I could be among them now, being filmed as I say that it is in the resilient rurality of these villages that Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit unfolds, that is, a spiritual disposition of letting-be, an openness to the essence of things, and, as he interprets in his Parmenides, how it reveals itself through history and daily life. But at some point, a scooter would honk to urge me out of the way, and it would be right to do so. So, thousands of kilometers away, I conclude by saying that there, people have never betrayed their own history, even while embracing change, reminding us that the truth of a place is not measured by the order of its exotic scenery, nor through a mere anthropological lens. Especially not in that land, Vietnam, daughter of the sky, immersed in the dreamlike dimension of its eternity.

On the left: Tả Củ Tỷ Sheng Pu’er Autumn 2023, medium aged, old and ancient trees
On the right: Tả Củ Tỷ Sheng Pu’er Spring 2024, old and ancient trees

Viet Sun Tả Củ Tỷ Sheng Pu’er Autumn 2023

The autumn version comes from a mixture of medium-aged, old, and ancient trees growing at different altitudes and on diverse soils. It presents itself with a mature register, more oxidized, and the difference from the spring version is indeed perceptible. The autumn leaves are darker, as confirmed by the liquor, a decidedly golden hue, with shades that recall Turner’s Goethe’s Theory, to stay on theme. While the wet leaves retain a line of continuity with the orchid and apricot notes typical of the spring harvest, here honeyed tones and hazelnut hints emerge more clearly, intertwined with musky nuances, dried fruit and pan-fried greens memories, with lightly buttery accents.

Although vibrant, the sip is clearly more fragile, with a more hesitant body compared to the spring tea. Its huigan is more restrained and immediate, with sharper astringency, although the impression remains of a sweet brew with well-calibrated bitterness. Rather than floral aspects, the palate leans more toward raisin, apricot, and unmistakably honeyed flavors. The mouthfeel is less viscous, with more modest intensity and persistence, yet it remains decidedly interesting for this theater of contrasts between warm, comforting fragrances and still grassy notes, between roundness and sharpness. It is a tea that certainly holds aging potential, but is already quite enjoyable in its youth.

Viet Sun Tả Củ Tỷ Sheng Pu’er Spring 2024

I believe there are four essential elements that make a Pu’er good, if I were pressed to summarize: aroma, the taste of the mountain, excellent viscosity and huigan. And all of them are here. There are no substantial altitude differences compared to the autumn counterpart, but here we have leaves only from old and ancient trees. They appear lighter, less reddened, the liquor takes on a straw-yellow hue, and the aroma recalls that of orchid, not the florist’s kind, but the wild one you stumble upon between the cracks of limestone, with scents of an intensely floral field and apricots.

Framing it is a very light smoky note that fades quickly over the course of the session, while a constant forest-like tone remains, along with wet stone elements that greatly define the olfactory texture. The character is decidedly more intense, more subtly grassy and floral, geared toward evolution over time. The liquor is beautifully smooth, sustained by light bitterness and astringency, which pave the way for a huigan that is reactive, quick, enveloping, and progressively expands from throat to palate.

As the session continues, it constantly reminds me of some Pu’er from Gedeng, but even more boldly floral and with a distinctly mineral signature. The huigan and the persistence of the aftertaste are undoubtedly the pillars of the tasting experience, two traits that make you forget many gushu from beyond the border.

Note: All the stunning photos of the passages were taken by Steve (Viet Sun)

3 May 2025
Shaping the Earth: The Instinctiveness and the Human-Matter Connection. A journey through the ceramics of Damian Piątkowski.

There is a gesture, absolute and primordial, that precedes every form of calculating thought: shaping matter. Before architecture, before writing, before utterances became language, there was the hand that molded the earth, shaping it with generative tension. Instinctive, untamed ceramics, in which function and flair do not yield to any technique, are the manifestation of an art that does not ask permission from aesthetics; it is substance, it exists and consists purely in itself.

To it belongs that rural spirit that calls for a necessary return to a time when not everything had to be polished, constrained by automation. It offers itself to the kiss of flame, to the intimacy of fire, whose tailor is alchemical chemistry; within it dwells man, not the perfect one, obsessed with premeditated thought, but the one who falls, who errs, who returns to the earth to reclaim his material condition. It is a reminder of the human, of a beauty that does not stubbornly seek to appear as such; a silent resistance to homogenization.

Nonetheless, I have often reflected on this way of making ceramics, trying to understand the phenomenon of instinct. And through this exploration, I’ve come to realize that contemporary wabi-sabi has nothing to do with this kind of spontaneity. The more I observe the work of true artists, the more I see how the term wabi-sabi has taken on mostly derogatory connotations, an aesthetic shortcut. I’ve seen a flood of pseudo-artists making so-called “wabi-sabi” ceramics, with imperfect forms, teetering between the amorphous and something regurgitated by an earthquake, claiming to tell stories of “the art of imperfection.” But there is no story. Only form. Only matter. Even more sterile than mass production. Just an attempt to sell incompetence.

But the ceramics of Damian Piątkowski, Jiří Lang, Jiří Duchek, Andrzej Bero, and Jan Pávek are completely different. In Eastern Europe, a movement has emerged, led by these great ceramists who celebrate the unrepeatable, the uniqueness of creation, its original matrix. While in China, perfectionists like Wu Haoyu and Wang Shi Jun, legends of Yixing like Zhou Dingfang, Yuan Weixin, Yang Hui Ying, or of Jianzhan like Chen Xu, Lai Yun Ping, Xiong Zhonggui have risen to prominence, Europe, too, has now undoubtedly reached greatness, albeit in a different way.

The unpredictability of the result takes on a new form, a recovery of physicality and of the body, not only in its imperfection, but in its symbols, in its meanings.

The ceramics by Damian (clayoncy) that you see in the photo embody all of this: not a regression into some ancestral making, but a conscious position that places the human-matter bond back at the center through a pre-ontological dimension of form, offering a radical alternative to mere artifice and the reproducibility of shapes, reconstructing not only perspectives and objects, but entire ways of experiencing sensibility and inhabiting the present.

18 April 2025
On the Sidewalks of the Sacred and the Spent – Seven Essence Darjeeling Autumn Augury

Augury is a Seven Essence Darjeeling oolong conceived under a notion of tea-making that is almost Liberty-like, moved by a secular liturgy made of gestures, of manners, of repetitions never entirely identical to themselves. It is the progeny of a movement that knows no envelope, neither of the body nor of the imagination; it is a struggle against the terror of uniformity and constraint. It compels one to separate from judgment dictated by the flesh.

Drinking it brings back memories of late nights, with the head resting against the wall in front of Casa Florio Nizza, a massive liberty building by Bellini, adorned with cast stone phytomorphic decorations, where the opacified windows let the light filter in like a profane cathedral. The wrought iron of the railings, twisted with almost conscious intent, seemed aware of being among the few survivors of an extinct architectural race.

This tea brings back to my throat the mineral warmth of those walls, thoughts on the excesses of a life long past, on surrendering beauties, on the last cigarettes smoked standing among those fervent buildings, custodians of descents into hell and fleeting redemptions. A youth lived on worn-out sidewalks, eroded by the disheveled snobbery of its regulars. These were neighborhoods inhabited by angry adolescents, womanizing masons, criminal dandies, penniless but enlightened artists and inept silver spoon kids; people who, in any other context, would never have met.

The cup appears like that neighborhood, a unifier of opposites, a place incapable of saving anyone, but at least able to ennoble our desire for consolation. With its scents of magnolia, orchard grass, fermented fruit and tuberose, it seems conceived by the olfactory extremism of Cavagna, but what strikes is not only its flamboyant sweetness, the total absence of bitterness, or its glyceric texture, but the verticality of the composition: a Dantean ladder climbing through wildflower honey and the early setting of gooseberries. There are notes of peach candy, guava nectar, coconut water, and pomelo, followed by an archetype of tropical fruit that closes on a fragrance of passion fruit, with an almost surreal intensity.

15 April 2025