Tea road to the skies. Part 1, In the kingdom of green gold
(DVD)

Running time on container, 23 minutes.

Original Enlish language release, Contemporary Arts Media in 2007.

Camera and sound, Zhou Weiping ; editing, Cecile Beaulande Kemmeche, Isabelle Collin ; music, Zhang Qianyl, Zhang Ke.

Narrator: Randy Holden with the voices of Sandy Bernard, Robert Bradford, Steven Croce, Peter Hercombe.

"It crosses the roof of the world, winding more than 4,000 tortuous kilometers across 20 mountain chains and two desert plateaux. It spans four great rivers, and cuts through the territory of 26 different ethnic groups. This is the ancient Tea Road, which opens Southwest China onto Tibet and thereby Nepal, India, Persia, Mongolia and Russia, and then Europe. The legendary Tea Road, crossed by Marco Polo during his travels, but used by innumerable horse trains for countless centuries before him. Their tracks are beaten deep into the rocks. This series of High Definition films follows in the hoofprints of those caravans which hauled their baggage of tea across the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas to be sold in the markets of South West Asia and dispersed to the entire world. IT is in the subtropical rainforests of Southwest China that our journey to the land of tea begins. We witness the harvest of wild tea, from the original and gigantic tea trees (camellia sinensis) but also the collecting of cultivated tea, the famous Pu'er Tea which is still cultivated here in the olden ways, by traditional tea planter families who have been here for centuries. The cultivation of tea, the harvest and sorting of the tea leaves, its fermentation and conditioning into cake and brick-like units to facilitate transportation on horseback is handled here to this day according to rituals thousands of years old. In each valley, within each ethnical group, sometimes even within a tribe or extended family, the tea producers have their very own secrets in the process of tea making, carried forward generation by generation." -- Container.

DVD.

DVD