A tea artisan with a secret technique for scenting tea flees to Bianjing and starts out at a roadside tea stall. She crushes the industry’s monopoly with “Jasmine Ice-Soul Soup” and joins forces with Pei Yan, a finance official from a humble family, to reform tea taxes. When flames engulf the flower fields, she tests poison with her own blood and wields commerce as a blade, forging an idyllic maritime refuge for women amid a storm of political intrigue: “Rouge Tea Haven.” At last, her tea banners blot out the sun as she breaks the thousand-year-old shackles of the scholar-merchant class.
