Hoffman is obsessed; during his youth he spent four years with Tibetan monks in Nepal, which included a friendship with the Dalai Lama, and was introduced to some of the finest of teas. Unable to find anything but insipid tea bags in the U.S., Hoffman began traveling to China, the homeland of tea. There, he struggles against language barriers and Byzantine business codes to convince the Chinese that the farmers make better tea than the factories and that their craft should be honored and preserved.

This craft can not be learned from a book, but has been handed down through generations of tea makers for thousands of years. He drags the reluctant tea factory aficionados up a lush, terraced mountainside and brings them face to face with those "dirty" farmers. In an ironic twist, Hoffman reintroduces them to one of their country's oldest traditions.

But Hoffman is even a step ahead of his own country in that he is advocating "fair trade" and organics. Images of the farmers standing on urban street corners selling a week's harvest for three dollars, in the shadow of China's increasing number of high rises, illustrate the paradox that stepping into the modern world imposes.

Tea experts James Norwood Pratt, Gaetano Kazuo Maida, and Winnie W. Yu provide the fundamentals of tea, lending weight to Hoffman's endeavor.

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Reviews
"Is the production and marketing of tea similar to the production and marketing of a pair of jeans? David Lee Hoffman's obsession with converting Chinese bureaucrats to an appreciation of the importance of quality and the preservation of their own cultural heritage makes for a highly compelling documentary, one that can be used successfully for classroom discussion on such issues as the seeming imperatives of globalization and modernization. As Hoffman demonstrates, quality need not be at the expense of export profits."