Life around the tea

Oliver Schneider

Yunnan, a state of China which is between the border of Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar, produce the tea from more than thousand years. In the middle of the mountain, some villages built by the old stone look trying to resist the time. Men and women here continue to repeat the same gesture from their ancestor and produce a tea with their passion and their know-how.

¨Life around the tea¨ brings us into the everyday life of a family producer in the old village Yi Wu, witch is important in the history of tea.

There are three generations live under the same roof: the grandparents continue until nowadays the traditional way to pick up the tea leaves and all the process of the tea transformation ; the young couple revel us the complicate reality of this famous tea land and the business speculation. A simple daily life of one family brings us to some different universes.

This is neither about an investigation, nor looking for understanding the tea technique or the life of the protagonist, but more like a immersion inside another kind of daily life.

Author, Olivier Schneider, is very passion of the tea, he lives beside the tea producer since about 10 years, and publishes amount of articles about tea and its culture. To create this graphic work, he lived with this family in a severals times, in the beginning there was so many surprise and discovering, but little by little, he became to catch something more intimate and familiar.
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