A procurement specialist who treats timber like leaf
Michael Zhan grew up among Lipton tins and aged shuǐ xiān — his grandfather ran a modest tea stall in Quanzhou, Fujian. The family expected him to go into tea brokerage, but Michael was drawn to the object side of ceremony: the grain of a chá pán, the heft of a kneeling stool. He studied material science in Xiamen, then joined a furniture export firm, quickly frustrated by how little buyers understood the wood they were buying. That’s when Teamotea came calling.
He joined the operations team and immediately insisted that procurement for tea furniture must work like procurement for tea — a lot-by-lot, single-origin approach. “If we can trace a cake of pu-erh to a single village and farmer, why can’t we trace a tabletop to a single fallen zhā mù trunk?” he argued. That philosophy now anchors the tea.furniture collection.
Michael now spends three months a year in Yunnan, traversing the Nu River valley and the foothills of the Wuliang Mountains. He has built relationships with village cooperatives that salvage storm-felled yangmu and hongmu, paying 30 % above local rates to ensure careful handling and legal chain of custody. In Fujian, he works with bamboo harvesters who time their cuts to the waning moon — a folk practice he’s documented to confirm lower starch content and better pest resistance, critical for seating that must withstand humidity.
His sourcing travels unexpectedly led him to Henan. While researching traditional floor seating for a teahouse restoration project in Kaifeng, he discovered a mat-weaving workshop tucked into a courtyard behind the Iron Pagoda. The workshop, run by three generations of the Liang family, still used Yellow River reeds harvested by hand, dried on river stones, and woven on antique looms. Michael spent two weeks learning the rhythm of the mats, then struck a direct partnership. That collaboration yielded the Hand-woven floor mat set — the only product in the furniture line sourced outside his core regions, but carrying the same traceable story.
Today, he trains junior buyers in “field first” procurement: don’t approve a lot without seeing the tree stump. His field notes appear regularly on tea.travel, and he’s a guest lecturer for tea.school’s “Material & Space” module. When not on the road, he can be found in Teamotea’s warehouse, grading wood planks with the same concentration a tea master uses to evaluate dry leaf.
The Henan mat workshop — where reed meets loom
Tucked away in Kaifeng’s old Hui district, the Liang family workshop has produced reed mats for five generations. The reeds (lú wěi) grow along the Yellow River floodplain’s shifting banks, absorbing silt minerals that give the finished mats a subtle silvery sheen and surprising resilience. Harvest takes place in late autumn, when the stalks are hollow but not brittle; the Liang family cuts them by hand, bundles them in hemp, and cures them on sun-heated river stones for forty days before they’re ready to be sorted by thickness.
Weaving happens on upright wooden looms built in the 1920s, tensioned by river stones. A single mat takes eight hours of continuous work — the weaver passes three weft strands through each warp in a pattern that creates the distinctive herringbone surface. Michael Zhan’s collaboration introduced a finishing step: edges are now bound with raw silk thread instead of cotton, a detail that reduces fraying and nods to tea ceremony textiles.
The workshop employs ten weavers, all from the Liang extended family. Teamotea’s commitment to buying two annual harvests’ worth has allowed them to restore the roof, build a drying shed, and train the youngest granddaughter, aged seventeen, in the old patterns. Michael visits twice a year to check consistency and deliver new design tweaks — always small, always respectful.