Tea by Yuan is a small business that is founded in the summer of 2022.
We are a family of tea heads from Chengdu, China. One of us is based in China, and the other based in Germany. We have been to the major tea production areas all around China and visited numerous tea farmers, tea roasters, and tea ceremony masters. We want to connect the best tea farmers with the best tea roasters to get the best quality of tea and make it available to people across borders.
We are enthusiastic about not only tea, tea wares, and tea culture, but also in the modernisation of their aesthetics and the adaptation to a 21st century lifestyle.
Keeping the essence and spirit while peeling away the burden of convention and prejudice. We wanna help with the metamorphosis of Chinese tea culture, to generate newness and livelihoods among an international crowd of tea lovers(starting now from Europe). To give more options and knowledge to you tea heads out there! 🌐
Some of the tea wares are directly imported from China, which are either made by individual artisans or collectives. And others of our tea wares are locally produced by artisans based in Europe(currently mostly in Germany). We function as a collective for ceramists, carpenters, and other craftsmen which we get to know in person. This way,
we bridge the independent delicate production of small producers and the market.
Unlike usual industrial commodities
, our method is slow and provides a limited amount of yields. We tend to collaborate with the farmers and roasters who conduct their production process the traditional handcrafted way and try our best to avoid industrial procedures. This is why we only offer a small collection of tea in each season. We provide you with newly acquired tea sorts every few months, so you can always have fresh tastes and fragrances to try out. Follow us on social media, to keep updated and notified when our new collections become available:)
Next to the tea leaf collections, we also offer you a curated selection of tea tablewares to brew the tea with.
In China, there are now many different school of brewing Chinese whole leaf tea. It stretches a whole spectrum of methods from strict and traditional methods to newly invented ones. We are not interested in either of these polarities as
we believe that tea culture is about the fluidity and the intangible spiritual experiences
instead of dogmatic preservations and uprooted flamboyant. We want to provide you a simple yet respectful way of entering the world of tea with neutral, minimalistic, functional, elegant designs.
When we first arrived in Europe
one of the biggest cultural shock was that the western tea ceremony is also commonly associated only with female/domestic lifestyle regarded by the society with certain assumptions. Amongst younger generations, the appreciation and hobby of taking time for a tea ceremony is especially overlooked.
In China, tea culture is different in a way that also the younger generations dedicate their career and leisure to tea culture despite sexuality and social roles. We think that the cause of this split is not only the lack of authentic source of tea commodities, but also the lack of immaterial discourse and culture about the soul and spirit of tea. It is a form of social activity just like the practice of yoga, the discovery of natural wine.
The word TEA is a reduction of a huge ecosystem of culture, philosophy, poetry, aesthetics, meditation, spirituality, healing, crafts and way more…
We would like to create a platform and a community not only to exchange goods, but also to exchange experience and knowledge.
We post weekly journals on our website about facts, stories, critique, reviews, interview, and even fictions about tea in the English language and also in the visual language of photography and illustration.
In the future, we will also host pop up shops accompanied by tea ceremony workshops in urban and nature locations across Europe.