A Roof, a Tea Grove and the Forest Beyond

A village roof at Jingmai is surrounded by more than a view of tea. In a 2023 interview, heritage scholar Chen Yaohua describes settlement within a pattern of nearby cultivation and woodland retained outside it. The result can be read outward from houses to tea groves and forest. Village and crop occupy a shared neighbourhood.

The same interview describes tea imagery on Blang village roofs, including a bud with two leaves. Tea also appears in invitations and marriage gifts in the account. Cultivation thus leaves signs on buildings and social occasions, carrying the plant beyond the plot where it grows.

The forestry description gives a second perspective: a broad descent from sacred mountain and forest through tea groves and villages to dry fields, paddies and rivers. This is an overall land-use sequence across the heritage area. It complements the outward pattern around a village, showing how cultivation and settlement also depend on height.

House photographs from Mangjing make the village scale tangible: timber walls, raised upper levels, roofs and narrow routes between buildings. Beyond a single frame lies the larger arrangement of working land. Jingmai’s cultural landscape gains its depth from these nested scales—the house, its village, the tea grove and the mountain.