By Nur Amira Bte Mohamed Amidun, U1630340H

Young, old, man and wife
Soft touches and keen eyes
Picking tea leaves sprouted from fresh buds
A humble task yet so significant to our daily lives

Mounds aplenty to wither and dry
For hours, these leaves are set aside
With callous hands, racking constant
To develop the flavour you indefinitely find divine

Fire crackling, small batches of fallen gold
Process long as its tradition is old
Lit and moved by hands softened by experience
Dried and aged between stone molds

Shaped like bing, bird nests or bricks [1]
Compressed and packed in paper sheets
From peasants to scholars to Kings with riches
A simple cup, a currency for trade
A common tea brick, its worth accumulates

Pu’erh is its name

– Bian Liao, Western Han Dynasty

(A servant whose story was immortalised in Wang Bao’s A Contract with a Child Servant written in 59 BCE. As compensation for the injustice and mistreatment of her Lady Yang Hui, she was given gold and an opportunity to apprentice under Wang Zi Yuan where she observed and learned the methods of production and brewing tea.)

[1] Bing is a wheat flour-based Chinese food with a flattened or disk-like shape, often filled with meat, scallions and egg. Commonly eaten for breakfast or street food.