Blog
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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The Price of Inconsistency: The State of the Market and Why an Uncontrolled Price Increase is So Dangerous
A few days ago, a couple of videos by Farmer Leaf were published on the situation of leaves prices in Yunnan, with some insights similar to an article I posted back in late January, written with a slight tone of historical catastrophism, which, rereading it now, almost feels like a premonition. But that happens because…
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How Money Can Buy Your Taste. And Why You Should Buy Tea Anyway.
Universities are fascinating places to discuss how money cannot buy happiness. Perhaps because young people at that age are often strapped for cash and, at the same time, eager to prove that money can’t buy everything, not even that feeling, that harmony between duty and desire, between the passive acceptance of immediate pleasure and the…
Wild Harvested 