📸 Instagram | 🎥 TikTok | 🎬 YouTube

The fog came in thick and held on throughout, causing the granite columns cloaked in vines to disappear into the sky above. The drive wound through hairpin turns secured by minuscule barriers, sheer drops waiting beyond them. We sped through every curve, each blind stretch taken more than halfway over the dividing line, hoping for the best.

So how did I end up banking corners at twice the speed limit, scaling this otherworldly landscape? Because tea has a tendency to favor the remote, towering, and serene. This was no exception.

Tea and Buddhism became intertwined during the Tang dynasty (7th–10th centuries), when both tea culture and Chan (or Zen) Buddhism began to spread widely throughout China. Monks initially took to the drink as a form of medicine, before quickly finding it an apt tool for maintaining focus during meditation. Much like coffee would later spread through Sufi devotional culture in the Islamic world, tea became intertwined with Buddhist monastic life.

Tea was a simple ritual requiring mindfulness while promoting harmony with the world around you. The two were a natural fit.

Buddhist temples became more than just spiritual centers where tea was consumed. They became testing grounds for the growth, production, and consumption of the plant itself. They helped shape the tea culture we still associate with today.

One of my main goals for this trip was to experience it firsthand. What better place than Wuyishan, where both black and oolong tea originated among the region’s cliffs and valleys, and whose landscape was later designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its “Red Mountains and Jade Waters.”

The complex at its peak is known as the Tianxin Yongle Zen Temple and traces its roots back to that initial spread of Chan during the Tang dynasty. But this place isn’t just a beneficiary of tea’s history, it’s a foundational part of it.

Tianxin Yongle is widely regarded as the birthplace of Da Hong Pao, or big red robe, the world’s most famous Oolong tea. And it brings the kind of tourism you’d expect along with it.

When we first arrived I got nervous, as flag-totting tour guides led throngs off their buses. Another sacred site, lost to tourism. I cynically resigned myself to it. Thankfully, our first stop was a secluded gazebo where we met Tian Chan.

Tian Chan was a fresh-faced monk somewhere in his late 40’s, but was only ordained in 2022. Before that? He was a banker in Malaysia.

“I came here to volunteer and I had never felt so at peace,” He said, a gentle smile of inner calm swept across his face. “So I came back for good.”

It turns out his story wasn’t unique. There was a mix of career monks and mid-life converts among the ranks. Partly because the qualifications weren’t as strict as I envisioned. No entrance exam, diploma, or rigorous trial period. Instead, “understanding the texts and being prepared to live this lifestyle.”

Vegetarianism, abstinence, and 5 a.m. wakeups included.

My first morning in the temple complex started earlier than usual to attend morning prayer, the day’s most important. I stayed toward the back, following as closely as I could for 30 minutes of standing meditation. Then, the room quickly shifted into another half hour of synchronized walking, chanting, and hand motions around the temple’s main hall. Drums thumped with every beat, incense wafted by, cymbals rang out across the hall. Whether you wanted it or not, the rhythm pulled you in.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the main hall emptied in a matter of seconds. We met Tian Chan outside, without acknowledgement of the sacred ritual we’d just experienced. We ate a communal breakfast, which was followed by a tour of the temple grounds, explaining every chamber, decoration, and deity. He led us through a Qigong session overlooking the mountains, and we met up with a few more monks, including one who spoke fantastic English after spending 12 years in Thailand.

They toured me around their tea plantations, whose finished product can reach 5 figures per kilo. This wasn’t just a coincidence.

Legend has it that a Ming-era scholar fell ill nearby en route to the civil service examinations, by far the most important avenue to social mobility in imperial China. He was found severely ill and was taken into the care of the temple’s monks, who healed him with the tea they’d grown. The young scholar regained his strength and made it to the exam in time to pass.

The newly minted imperial official returned to the mountain and wrapped the tea trees in red silk as a means of protecting them, giving the tea the name it carries to this day.

So the temple doesn’t fund itself through donations, it’s self-sustaining. More than covering their expenses with tea sales from the Da Hong Pao grown and processed in the surrounding grounds.

Eventually, it was time for tea. Our ever-growing crew departed for the living quarters, where the centerpiece was a massive tea table, likely 20-by-5-foot. We started with a variety of teas grown and processed on site. The mood was great, and the tea even better until one moment something changed. The room that had relaxed seemed to tense up a bit. Smiles faded into straight faces just as shoulders perked up. Not out of fear, but of respect for the gravity of that moment.

I knew he was behind me before turning around.

He came in with a quiet confidence, almost gliding across the floor, the bottom of his robe floating effortlessly behind him. Everyone gave a respectful bow, hands pressed together. Multiple seats were offered and he settled into the one opposite my own on the host’s side of the table.

This was the Shifu, abbot of one of China’s most historically important tea temples. His attendance that day was rumored but never confirmed. His name was never revealed, we were not allowed to share any photographs. But none of that was necessary to understand the weight of his presence.

He began asking me a few questions in Chinese to which my translator stepped in and answered on my behalf.

“America?” He took a beat, his facial expression noticeably changing as he stared into my eyes.

Uh-oh.

After a moment, he continued. I waited anxiously, the last person in the room to be clued in. “You know we call this tea Da Hong Pao. Maybe this would be a good one for you to bring back home because you all seem to look so beautiful.”

I laughed on the outside, but on the inside it was a sigh of relief.

After an hour or so, he beckoned me to the other side of the table. It was my turn to prepare tea. It felt as though I had been asked to lead grace at a monastery on no notice. He watched intently as I tried to put all of my skills up until that point to use.

Pour the water off to the side of the tea, immediately replace the lid. Thumb and middle finger on either side of the rim, index finger over the lid, leaving a couple millimeters of space between the two. Elbow tucked, wrist flicked confidently, but without too much panache.

A slow tilting of the gaiwan over the gong dao bei.

As the tea gently flowed from bowl to cup, I could sense a collective exhale from my traveling party. The Shifu nodded in approval, and my teacher did the same.

After that, the rhythm came naturally. Before I knew it, one of the monks was slipping off his outer robe and placing it over my shoulders. As I returned to the host’s chair, the Shifu began discussing my month-long residency, which he then extended to 3 and finally 6 months.

Surrounded by genuine love, awe-inspiring nature, and deep introspection, it was hard to say no. Quite honestly, it felt like it actually might be the best thing for me. I can be a vegetarian for 6 months and 5 a.m. isn’t too early if I just get to bed on time. Romantic relationships would be harder to talk around, but I can get to that one later.

My short period of entertaining the idea came to an abrupt end as almost all departures seem to happen in China. The Shifu departed as unceremoniously as he had arrived. A few seconds later he was out of sight.

I was left to wander through the vast corridors on my own and I reflected back on an anecdote earlier in the conversation.

“People come to the temple looking for answers” he said, almost bemoaning it. “And a monk’s response is always the same: go and drink tea, go and drink tea.”

When I first heard it, I was a bit disappointed. Part of me had been hoping for some kind of revelation. Some tea-prayer wisdom that could help unlock the secrets I set out to find.

But maybe that’s not how Buddhism – or life – works. The monks weren’t holding back on their advice out of selfishness. They do so because they believe the answers are already within you. To them, tea is the vessel to uncover them.

In the days since my visit, I’ve looked at tea a little differently. I’m less focused on consuming as much information as I can: age, steep time, leaf quality, and more on the act itself. All previously in service of gaining the knowledge and authority I feel is required to speak on the topic.

Instead, I have tried to take a different approach.

To drown out the noise. Allowing every drop to trickle out. Every hand movement to sit with intention. And to carry a piece of their teaching with me for the rest of my life.

Sources

• UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Mount Wuyi

• Britannica — Wuyi Mountains

• Teasenz — The Legend of Da Hong Pao Tea

• Serious Eats — The Ancient Chinese Ritual Behind a Favorite Green Drink

📸 Instagram | 🎥 TikTok | 🎬 YouTube

📸 Instagram | 🎥 TikTok | 🎬 YouTube

Tea powered China’s army.

Just not in the way you’d think.

By the Tang dynasty, China faced mounting pressure from nomadic cavalry powers.

But they couldn’t produce horses in the quantities their military needed, so they built a system to acquire them: tea into Tibet, horses back to China. The terrain in between was among the most treacherous on Earth, requiring months of sustained endurance to complete. But the strategic value justified the danger.

This would come to be known as the Ancient Tea Horse Road.

According to legend, Princess Wencheng of the Tang dynasty married into the Tibetan royal family in 641 AD. She brought with her some of the empire’s precious tea as part of her dowry and the Tibetan court embraced it.

Tibet is a high alpine environment, with little arable land forcing a diet heavily reliant upon meat, dairy, and animal fats. It was notoriously difficult to digest and tea helped offset the strain.

Its value was obvious, but it mostly remained among the royal and aristocratic classes during the Tang dynasty.

The Song faced greater pressure than their predecessors. The Liao, Western Xia, Jin, and other frontier foes tested their strength. That led to the creation of Tea Horse Agencies (茶马司), designed to regulate tea monopolies and institutionalize tea-horse trade.

This was welcomed by wider Tibetan society, which directly benefited from the introduction of more tea into their diet and lifestyle. It became a part of daily life, often combined with fermented yak’s milk as a calorie-rich staple. This evolved into an interdependence, with some historical accounts describing consumption exceeding a dozen cups daily.

As trade increased, an entire economy developed around it, including the standardization of production methods, weights and measures, pricing, and transportation routes. Tea was compressed into bricks and then loaded onto caravans for transport. They weren’t just creating an agricultural product, but a transregional commodity.

The Song saw something even larger taking shape: an opportunity to build not only a controlled trade network, but one that could finance the empire.

They went to work building one of the most sophisticated commodity-control systems in pre-modern China.

Farmers had annual production quotas and government sales requirements. Merchants needed licenses, permits, certificates, and state authorization. And the consumers supplemented all of it by paying inflated prices for their goods.

The Song intensified demand and expanded trade for a resource they desperately needed. Then monopolized production and monetized every layer of the network. It was the kind of statecraft that sustained empires for centuries.

For those on the ground though, things weren’t so simple.

The route spanned tropical jungle, steep hillsides, and Himalayan mountain passes at elevations in excess of 15,000 feet, making it one of the harshest sustained trade routes in human history.

Journeys along the main line from southern Yunnan to Lhasa in Tibet lasted 4–6 months, at a pace of 15–25 km (9–15 mi) per day.

Men carried bags of tea bricks, food, and other goods in baskets that they balanced on bamboo frames and slung over their shoulders. Porters routinely carried loads of 60–90 kg (130–200 lb). Mules, horses, and even yaks would carry roughly the same.

A small caravan might consist of 10–20 animals, a few porters, and some local guides. Larger ones could include religious leaders, extra handlers, and even security to ensure safe passage.

Mule bells, prayer chants, and creaking wooden frames dominated the soundscape, set against towering cliffs, endless ice, and dense jungle.

It was common for caravans to be lost without notice, merely slipping off a hillside into the abyss. The losses were built into the economic model, but the human toll was not.

It should not come as a surprise then to learn that those who sustained the system weren’t the ruling class, but mostly smaller ethnic groups on the empire’s southwestern frontier.

Minority communities such as Tangut, Dai, Tibetan, and Blang were central from cultivation to transport and trade.

This increased the strategic importance of the region. With each tea brick they made, they were essentially printing money.

And while tea was responsible for the journey, over time, the journey began to influence the tea.

Tea is a living product that changes with its surroundings: it soaks up smells, slowly ferments, and loses tea polyphenols and caffeine with age.

The tea that showed up in Tibet and Beijing wasn’t the same tea that left Yunnan. So the tea makers had to adapt.

Over time they started to make tea that didn’t just survive the journey, but thrived because of it. Modern Pu’er builds on the fermentation process that was once incidental, where cakes are stored for years in aging warehouses, inextricably linking product with passage.

Today the Ancient Tea Horse Road is a distant memory. It faded slowly during the 20th century with the advancement of mechanized transport and industrialized warfare. Cities were built upon some of its most important trade posts, but most of the rugged overland route has been returned to nature.

After nearly 1,200 years of activity, history has largely folded it into the extended Silk Road network and awareness has dwindled outside the regions it once connected. But its legacy shaped the geopolitical landscape, helping create lasting economic and political interdependence between neighboring powers and successive Chinese dynasties.

Most of all, it represents one of history’s clearest examples of a single commodity shaping an entire regional economy. That model still exists today; just look at the petro-states in Latin America and the Middle East. Imagine entire regions being almost entirely reliant on a few bottlenecks, with empires relying on their stability.

The Himalayan steppe of old is the Strait of Hormuz today. Because while the subject matter may change, the dynamics that drive conflict do not.

Sources

• National Geographic — The Forgotten Road of Tea and Horses

• Silk Road Foundation — The Ancient Tea and Horse Caravan Road

• American University Silk Road Journal — The “Ancient Tea and Horse Caravan Road”: The “Silk Road” of Southwest China

📸 Instagram | 🎥 TikTok | 🎬 YouTube

📸 Instagram | 🎥 TikTok | 🎬 YouTube

China is a country of more than 1.4 billion people. Over 90% of them trace their roots back to the Han ethnic group. In most of the country, that breeds cohesion: overlaps in food, language, culture, and value systems.

And then, there’s Yunnan.

If Han-dominant Confucian culture is the rule, Yunnan is the exception.

Around one-third of the province is made up of ethnic minorities, and 26 of China’s 56 recognized groups have a foothold here. Its geography reflects that same break. The province runs from Himalayan peaks towering over 6,000 meters high (nearly 20,000 feet) to tropical rainforest along the borders of Laos and Myanmar.

And it’s here, almost improbably, that tea survived.

Tea trees are believed to have spanned much of the globe in the Tertiary period, but an ice age around 2 million years ago nearly wiped them out entirely. Along the Lancang River, a combination of climate, elevation, and biodiversity provided refuge for the resilient plant that would come to be known as Camellia sinensis.

Jingmai Mountain is the heartbeat of this zone. So I spent two weeks between its many villages, coming to appreciate how each has its distinct character and history.

Life here revolves around tea. Jingmai has the world’s largest ancient tea forest at over 1,000 hectares. But unlike the aesthetically lined tea bushes in India, Japan, or Taiwan, these trees were planted almost at random, in a biodynamic forest, or one that includes a variety of plant species.

It’s objectively less productive than their perfectly manicured counterparts, but locals claim the leaves they bear are richer. In fact, they attempted to plant trees en masse in the 1980s, but the experiment failed. Without biodynamism and room to grow, the trees just didn’t produce the same quality tea. They went back to the wild forests.

As you make your way along the winding roads that shift between dirt and cobblestone, you’re immediately drawn to the roof ornamentation. Jingmai traces its origins back to two ethnic groups, the Dai and Blang (pronounced dye and boo-long). Each has its own architecture, creating visual distinctions from the moment you arrive.

We were welcomed into the homes, dining rooms, and holiday celebrations of each group at their most important time of year. Sharing food, dance, and baijiu—experiences beyond anything I could have imagined.

But of all of the experiences I had, one stands out.

Mr. Su Guowen is the 42nd generational leader of the Blang people on Jingmai Mountain, where they have lived peacefully since the early Han dynasty.

We joined him alone for tea a week before the Blang New Year and again throughout the festivities.

To understand its importance, you have to see what they give up to observe it. The tea industry, the economy’s driving force, relies on a prime plucking and processing window in a six-week period between late March and early May. Yet for this three-day festival, it shuts down entirely.

In its place are prayer, speech, dance, and chanting, interrupted only by spontaneous water fights that give the holiday its name: the Water Splashing Festival.

When you leave the drum circles for the quiet of the temples, you feel a duality—where Buddhist deities are intertwined with something even older.

That’s because the Blang follow two religions simultaneously: animism, as their ancestors did, and Theravada Buddhism. The latter arrived with the Dai around 1,700 years ago.

In one of the main temples, seven giant figures line the back wall, three on each side of a central diety. The surrounding six represent the spirits of land, insects, trees, water, animals, and tea.

The main figure is an amalgamation of the ancestors. He sits upright but not tense. In his right hand, he grips the trunk of an ancient tea tree, a young sapling rests gently in the palm of his left.

These ancestors are represented in each “tea spirit tree,” the first tree planted in every Blang garden. Many that still stand today are over 1,000 years old. Only the ancestral leader is allowed to pick leaves from them. Mr. Su shared some tea from one that day. I was able to take a cake home—one of his many ways of carrying the tradition forward in a form that can survive.

It was his work, and that of so many around him, that made UNESCO take notice. The organization designated Jingmai Mountain as a World Heritage Site in 2023.

Long overdue.

It is the first (and remains the only) World Heritage Site dedicated to tea, lagging well behind wine (Rhine Valley (1979), Saint-Émilion (1999)) and coffee (Southeast Cuba (2000), Colombia (2011)), among others.

But the initial sugar rush of money and attention may be short-sighted.

No country has seen as much change as China in the 21st century. As you peek down alleyways and stroll past the homes off the main street, you’re afforded brief glimpses into a world that goes back 2,000 years.

You can see the faces of the elders, still dressed in their traditional garb, speaking exclusively their native tongue, who remember when there were no outsiders, and really, no government intervention here. Locals say that most visitors aren’t here for the tea, but rather the views, the prestige of visiting a World Heritage Site, and, of course, the perfect selfie.

Today, the road is a treacherous three hours from the nearest airport, in a few months a new super-highway will cut that to under 60 minutes. What exactly Jingmai will look like in a few years, let alone a few decades, is an open question.

On our final visit, Mr. Su showed us two large horses that flank each side of the main doors to his home. The first belonged to his father, the other to his grandfather. Each a gift from a Qing dynasty emperor, alongside a sword, in recognition of their authority to rule over this area. Mr. Su doesn’t have a horse, the tradition was abandoned with the rise of the PRC.

A testament to the history of his lineage and how quickly it can be taken away.

As we prepared to leave, Mr. Su offered a proverb that is widely shared among the Blang people:

Our ancestors did not leave us gold or silver,

for they feared we would waste it.

Instead, they left us tea trees,

so that, generation after generation,

we would always have something to depend on.

That belief remains true even as the way it manifests begins to change.

Sources

• For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History — Sarah Rose

• UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Jingmai Mountain Ancient Tea Forest Cultural Landscape (2023)

• Tea: History, Terroirs, Varieties — Kevin Gascoyne et al.

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Tea (Camellia sinensis, origin and history)

• National Bureau of Statistics of China — Ethnic Composition of China

📸 Instagram | 🎥 TikTok | 🎬 YouTube

📸 Instagram | 🎥 TikTok | 🎬 YouTube

Before this journey really begins, we need to start with the basics. U.S. tea consumption is higher than you might think (on any given day, more than 50% of the population drinks some), but when it comes from Lipton or Arizona it’s easy to miss the bigger picture. That’s like learning about wine by drinking Franzia after 30 seconds in the microwave.

Part of the confusion stems from the word itself. In English, tea is a polysemy, or a word with multiple distinct but related meanings. Those meanings form a chain, from crop to cup and beyond:

1. A plant (Camellia sinensis)

2. Leaves (dried, before brewing)

3. A drink (after steeping)

4. A ritual (Gongfu tea)

5. A social event (afternoon tea)

6. Broader infusions (chamomile, rooibos, mate)

7. Social exchange (“give me the tea”)

This is the root of one of tea’s greatest misconceptions: at what point on that chain is something no longer tea? If you ask an American what their favorite tea is, often they’ll answer chamomile, jasmine, or peppermint. Except, those aren’t actually tea, at least not in the stricter sense defined above. Instead, those are tisanes, or herbal infusions, that the Western lexicon has lumped in with tea itself.

That leads us to misconception number two: that tea comes from many different plants—when in reality, it all comes from one. Yes, you read that correctly. From earl grey to oolong to matcha to whatever’s in that Arizona can, all tea comes from the same tree. It’s processing that turns it into the drink we know and love.

So how is tea processed? The answer is also how it’s differentiated. If you boil it down to one factor, it’s oxidation: an enzyme-driven reaction with oxygen that only occurs while the leaves retain sufficient moisture, typically expressed on a scale from 0 to 100 percent.

Think about the last time you sliced up an apple. Right after slicing it, the golden-white flesh is perfect, unblemished. Leave it out for a few hours, and that flesh would start turning brown. But with a dried apple? There would be no visible difference.

That’s oxidation at work and the same thing happens to tea, creating the difference between lighter teas like green and white, and darker teas like oolong and black.

The second major difference is fermentation: the microbial transformation behind things like beer and kimchi, applied to tea. This is most common in dark teas, though producers are now experimenting with other bases.

Oxidation and fermentation are often conflated—but the distinction drives major changes in composition, aging, flavor, and price. As good as a fresh spring tea may be, few things carry the economic mystique of an agricultural product aged for decades.

Once tea falls into one of six basic categories, it can be impacted further, or “reprocessed,” through additional fermentation, scenting, flavoring, or grinding. It can change form entirely, or barely at all. Just look at Burmese tea leaf salad. Once the leaves are brewed? There’s room for those too. See: tea leaf eggs.

But underneath all of it, what seems like a simple leaf is actually a complex chemical system that has been shaped by society for thousands of years to meet its needs. One that continues to evolve into the modern day.

After all of that, we’re back to the original question: what is tea? It’s somewhat in the eye of the beholder, and to reduce it after everything it has become would be a disservice to the craft. For this project, we can think of it as a plant that grew into something larger than itself. One that evolved alongside humanity, not apart from it.

But the answer to why tea matters isn’t hidden in the nuances above. If you rely solely on chemistry, you’re only seeing part of the picture.

Because none of this is how tea is actually experienced.

A few nights ago, we were hosted by Mr. Shaohong Zheng, the da lao ban, or “big boss,” who founded Sui Yue Zhi Wei Tea Company. He is among those credited with helping re-popularize Yiwu, one of the original regions associated with so-called “tribute teas,” or teas prepared for China’s emperors.

He pulled out a 1986 sheng Pu’er from his personal collection. It had started aging in Hong Kong just 3 years after my mom attended high school there, while it was still under British control. If only tea could talk…

After a lively conversation about the nuances of terroir and blending strategies, I asked Mr. Zheng how he would suggest introducing higher end teas to my own community back home, where a gaiwan isn’t something you’d expect to find in your hotel room.

He started tactically.

“Introduce them to the 5 major elements of tea tasting: aroma, sweetness, umami, bitterness, and astringency.”

It was a useful framework, and one we will lean on. But as I jotted down notes and began to prepare my next question, he kept going.

“Once they begin to drink you must teach them to feel the tea’s impact on their body. Then they can appreciate it.”

Interesting. I quickly wrote that down.

But he wasn’t finished.

“Finally, they must feel how tea impacts their spirit. Only then can they truly understand it.”

That is the real question of this journey: not just what tea is, but what it does to the people who drink it.

Sources

• For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History — Sarah Rose

• Tea Sommelier Coursework — International Academy of Chinese Tea

• Tea Processing Explained in Full — Wu Mountain Tea

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqDk2swTiB8

• The Story of Tea — Mary Lou Heiss, Robert J. Heiss

• Tea Fact Sheet — Tea Association of the USA
  https://www.teausa.org/tea-fact-sheet

📸 Instagram | 🎥 TikTok | 🎬 YouTube

📸 Instagram | 🎥 TikTok | 🎬 YouTube

Culture is disappearing

Not all at once, but quietly, piece by piece. We’ve been taught to believe that when faced with such problems, we inevitably land on the right solutions.

I don’t buy it.

We all feel more divided than ever, yet advancements have enabled the study of our fragmented history as a unified one. It’s time we look toward the past.

The more I read, the more I saw trends in how all societies evolved. We found similar ways to build and grow our influence, even without contact, suggesting those patterns weren’t accidental. My thesis is that we can understand what matters by studying what endured. Yet, the analog artforms that got us here are now endangered. Awareness is the first step, helping us balance preservation and progress.

I’m launching Lost in Space Media to experience culture through craft, bringing you along with me.

Eventually, I hope to follow the global development of textiles, ceramics, fermentation, paper, and metalsmithing, but I’ve decided to start with the plant that changed the world like no other, Camellia sinensis, more commonly known as the tea tree.

The Tea Trail

The history of this shrub from the mountains of Southwest China is a lengthy one, and shockingly misunderstood. There are plenty of legends, tales, and debates over its true origins, but what’s undeniable is its influence: from territorial disputes, geopolitics, and global commerce, to the way it has anchored daily life for billions.

Much of this has been left out of the American understanding. This is relatively unsurprising; our most popular story about tea was when a group of anti-colonial independence seekers dumped 46 tons of it into the Boston Harbor.

Our tea consumption reflects it. As opposed to its use as medicine, stimulant, or ceremonial tool as it is in the majority of the world, Americans drink 80% of their tea black, 85% iced, and more than 50% using added sugars or sweeteners. In the West, tea is often treated as fuel or convenience; elsewhere, it remains ritual, hospitality, and attention.

In order to understand a more complete picture, I am embarking on a 6-month journey to meet the plant at its roots. There are regions, production styles, and trade routes made famous over centuries, and we will study them over the course of this project, but unlike silk and spice, there is no singular ‘tea trail’ that the commodity once followed.

This trip is in part an attempt to weave together a scattered history and find parallels we don’t realize are there. After all, it’s difficult to argue such grave differences in people across the globe when nearly all of us sit down to chat over a cup of tea. Starting in the Jingmai mountains of Yunnan, China, and ending in the Rift Valley of Kenya, this trip will trace 5,000 years of tea history.

Through a combination of short-form video on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube and long-format writing here on Substack, I’ll sit down with the farmers, blenders, merchants, historians, and everyday people from the places where the plant sprang up and continues to thrive today. We will learn about colonization and global trade. And most of all, I’ll drink a whole lot of tea.

Author’s note

For those that are new to my work, I hope to properly set expectations. While I’m a seasoned traveller, I do not have a background in anthropology or ethnography. This is not an academic paper furthering research on ancient traditions. Lost in Space Media is structured as long-format journalism, full of immersion into crafts, artisans, and communities that are threatened. But as a sucker for the details, I will aim to link source material or list primary sources at the end of each post when possible.

Some of you may be asking yourselves (and others just asking me straight away) why I would leave my career behind to embark on such a diversion. The reality is I don’t know anything for sure. But for me, it’s about reconciling a systematic failure to learn from the experiences of those that came before us. In recognizing that, I hope to be a small part of reversing the trend, looking back, listening first and acting second.

This is The Tea Trail.

Sources

• Tea Fact Sheet — Tea Association of the USA
  https://www.teausa.org/tea-fact-sheet

• Tea and Health — National Institutes of Health (NCBI Bookshelf)
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK589770

  ---

📸 Instagram | 🎥 TikTok | 🎬 YouTube