Harvest Diary: Three Days as a Tea Picker in Lishan

5:30am. The sky is barely light. We're already standing at the edge of the tea rows, dew on our shoes, waiting for the harvest to begin. Three days of picking, turning, and drying tea is genuinely hard work. The physical reality of bending row after row reframes everything about how you look at a cup of tea. This diary captures what we saw, ate, and felt working alongside the Lishan farmers — and why we'll never take this cup for granted again.