This journey that I take along with Templar Foods is to travel, unravel and bring to light some of the geographies and nooks of the Asian tea world, which has also served as my home for the past decade. It is an unprecedented peak into the rituals, the styles of serving, and vitally the sources of ‘the green’, opening up worlds that are seldom seen. Through anecdotal tales, video and photographs we will travel, sip, sip some more and dig into one of the world’s great and underrated commodities that some 13 centuries ago first made its way aboard mule caravans to all points of the compass. Tea trails, tea types and the diverse and wonderfully spontaneous world of what the Chinese refer to as Cha, the Tibetans Jia, the Indians Chai and we in the west simply ‘tea’.
Asia’s great green commodity, tea, long understood in the east as something more than a consumable, has served many roles and represented many things for those who have lived beside it, consumed it and harvested it. It is the journey to these understated roots and vital personalities that is crucial to understanding tea. For as the Hani people of southern Yunnan say, “without understanding the soil and the people, one cannot understand the tea”.
It is in this spirit of tea’s ability to bring together and unite that I, along with Templar Foods, seek to share my expeditions into Asia’s worlds of tea – the worlds where tea is picked, fawned over and ‘created’, and take a look at aspects of tea that sadly remain entirely ignored by even connoisseurs – the precious people of tea.
Join us for a monthly injection of tea, of what many in the Himalayas often called “The fluid that was more lasting than a son”, and for a series of fresh on the spot updates from deep in Asia’s tea realm.