sheng and shu · what the years do and when to drink
Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.
Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.
The years are a guide, not a measure: storage decides everything. 20–30 °C, 60–75 % humidity, no foreign smells, no direct sun.
Puerh is changed by fungi and bacteria living on the leaf, and they need warmth and moisture. In a dry flat, where humidity stays below 60 %, a cake sits for years almost unchanged: it is being stored, not aged.
Two identical cakes from one pressing — one in humid Guangzhou, one in dry Kunming — will be different teas after ten years, and that difference is larger than a few years of age.
Shu grew out of the same fact: in the 1970s Yunnan learned to heap damp leaf into a pile and hold it there for 40–60 days under its own heat. The same transformation, compressed from decades into two months.
Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 5 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.
