Eastern Leaves has been invited by the renowned YiKe Talks, the Chinese version of the TED Talk, to deliver a speech during a special session dedicated to the sustainable and organic agricultural projects for the sake of Chinese future.

They asked us to talk about the story of our forest, and Vivian made us all so proud talking about our very beginning and how we and our tea trees have grown during the years under the forest safe shelter.
We started from the reasons that brought us to Yunnan from our native places, exploring our passions for both tea, tastes and forestal land.

The turning point in the presentation is a huge photo of a LongJing tea garden, with dozens of hectares of short bushes, an typical intensive farming, that contrasts so much with our vision. It triggered a quest for natural space, for a complex environment where being able to grow the best quality tea and to do it in a sustainable way, thus giving all the honours our host, the ancient forest.

We explained it using the shapes of the ancient tea trees, the way they adapt themselves to the space in the surrounding forest, and we did it talking about the Hani minority people, who were there long before us, and that long before anyone else domesticated those tea trees that nowadays we call ancient, keeping them in these same natural and rich conditions.

The talk was live-streamed and our speech got up to 500.000 people connected at the same time. At the end of the talk we received many interesting questions and a huge encouragement to hold our way, keeping our forest for the sake of anyone’s benefit.

For further info please visit www.yiketalks.com