Sourced in Yunnan’s textile lanes
Late in the spring of 2025, Michael Zhan spent a week walking the narrow alleys of a small textile quarter on the outskirts of Kunming. His brief was not tea, but the cloths that cradle it. For generations, small workshops here have printed the wrappers that protect Yunnan’s most prized pu’er cakes — and Michael was looking for a maker who still worked with iron‑based inks on unbleached linen, a combination that ages in parallel with the tea itself. What he found was a family‑run block‑printing atelier with a single iron press that dates to the 1920s. The master printer, a third‑generation artisan, keeps a small garden of dancong bushes beside the workshop; the sprig motif that appears on our cloths was drawn from one of those very shrubs. Michael worked with the printer to scale the design for both bing and tuocha wraps, ensuring the 28cm cloths could handle the smaller, thicker tuocha without excess fabric. Every cloth is printed cold with a ferrous dye that oxidises to a deep charcoal after drying, then washed once to set the ink. The result is a wrapper that isn’t merely decorative — it becomes part of the tea’s own story, darkening and softening with each use, much like the leaves it encloses.