Issue 08

Tea cannot be understood from a distance.

Issue 08 starts from that premise and follows it into the lives of people for whom this drink is not background but foreground — a companion to grief, to creativity, to the slow work of making something with their hands.

We speak with a man whose solace is trees: a bonsai practitioner for whom the art became a life's vocation. We look at ceramics — what the material asks of the maker, and how the communities that form around it hold together.

In Myanmar, ambition takes a particular shape. In India, the question of where its teas belong in the world remains open. Somewhere on the Mountain of the Moon, there is a treasure that may or may not be findable.

Tea spaces in Japan. Yak butter tea in the Himalayas. A long session with pu'er, a tea that has its own subculture, its own logic, its own devoted and occasionally obsessive following.

And finally: readers share their own tea spaces. The ordinary ones. The ones that matter most.