A style study — not a real store, not affiliated with Saul Steinberg · more
The tea table cartoon

Chinese tea · one pen line, cream paper

The city is drawn, the tea is real

Thirty-four Chinese teas dropped into pen drawings: one thin line builds the room, the map and the pot, and the photographed leaf is the only thing not sketched.

Toasted buckwheat granules photographed inside a drawn bowl on cream paper, surrounded by a pen-line city of water towers, cups and mountains

Seven categories, drawn from the table

34 teas · 7 categories

Green teaGreen tea5 teasOolongOolong14 teasRed tea (hongcha)Red tea (hongcha)6 teasPu-erhPu-erh4 teasWhite teaWhite tea2 teasTea paste (chagao)Tea paste (chagao)2 teasBuckwheat (not a tea)Buckwheat (not a tea)1 tea

Wear the drawing

All tees and hoodies →

Wear — Ālǐshān Zhū Lù CháĀlǐshān Zhū Lù CháWear — Bái JiānBái JiānWear — Passion-Fruit OolongPassion-Fruit OolongWear — Raw Pu-erh PasteRaw Pu-erh PasteWear — Ripe Pu-erh PasteRipe Pu-erh PasteWear — Dà Hóng PáoDà Hóng Páo

Why this shop is drawn rather than photographed

A single pen line can build a whole city and still admit that it is only a line, which is the joke these pages are told in. Everything around the tea is drawn — the pot, the bowl, the bridge, the map, the man in the hat who is not impressed — and the leaf itself is the one photographed object in the frame. That contrast does the describing: real granules in a drawn bowl look exactly as coarse as they are. The asides in the margins keep the proportions honest, because a map that puts Yunnan in the middle and labels everything else quite far is closer to how a tea drinker actually sees the world. Chinese tea suits this because it is a domestic habit before it is a luxury: someone sits down, boils water, and thinks about somewhere else. Cream paper and one nib width keep the whole shop at the scale of a page from a notebook. The single red mark is there so you notice the rest is ink.