Blog
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Bought It for the Feed. Paid for the Myth?
When a person starts consuming a lot of tea, and at the same time begins spending significant amounts of money, creating those situations where every online purchase takes on, in their mind, the aura of a bid at Christie’s for a Rubens painting, sooner or later, the people around them will pose the classic question:“That…
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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…
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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…
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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…
Wild Harvested 