Somewhere in a small city, wreathed by mountains, in Taiwan — in the early 2000s — something rather extraordinary was happening. 

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One day about ten years prior,  a man, already established in life, drank a 1910's Song Pin Hao — Blue Lable. It was, he said the first Pu-Erh tea he'd ever tasted. Upon drinking this tea he had the moment of— what is this now? The reset is, as we say, is history. Selling off his restaurants he bought tea, a lot of tea —

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Mr. Ho, after a time driving between artists colonies on the island of Taiwan, in a cube truck filled with antiqie Pu-Erh -- eventually settled in the hamlet of Gong Guan. At the side of a busy highway he opened a small tea shop -- which would become a destination -- for travellers with a particular kind of thirst. 

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He called the shop Expert — rather direct by Taiwan standards, but then again he had the arsenal of Pu-Erh to back it up. 

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This is where I first met him — past the door which was flanked by a purpose built waterfall.

 

Inside, under the dense heat of early summer, I walked into a wall of fermenting tea. and seemingly pulsating stillness. 

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Mr. Ho served me my first real Pu-Erh tea then, a forty year old Raw. In this, there was a moment of recognition difficult to describe. A moment which I'm still processing — on some level — all these years later.​ 

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In 2008 we translated the work Cha-Dao for the Way of Tea Research Society that had formed around Mr. Ho. It was at that time that  the real aprentiship in antique tea began, and when Cloudwalker first began.

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Cloudwalker — informed by past, though not confined by it. We honour tradition, craft, legacy, as they continue to inform where we find ourselves at present. It is not so much the replication of form, but the result we are most after.

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The work, in many ways, is simply the continuation of a conversation begun long ago — around a quiet table.

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