Jiamu Through the Ages: The Cultural Journey of Tea
Amid the mists of the south, there lives a precious tree that shares its fate with heaven and earth. Some grow barely a foot tall, stubbornly sprouting from cracks in the stone; others rise dozens of feet, spreading their branches beneath the dusk of the Bashan valleys. The oldest are so thick it takes two people to encircle their trunks, and when axes fell them, even the wood chips carry a clean, bitter fragrance. This is tea. In the humid air of the south, it has stood as part of the landscape for millennia. Its shape resembles the gualu, an intensely bitter shrub found in the countryside around Guangzhou; its leaves are glossy and smooth like gardenia leaves; its blossoms tremble like white roses, so pure they seem untouched by the world; and its fruit is as understated as the betel palm's
