Turned in a courtyard workshop in Henan
Michael Zhan first met the maker of these picks in 2019, on a sourcing trip that was nominally about a Xinyang green-tea cooperative. The workshop is in a village outside Zhengzhou — a single courtyard, one foot-pedal lathe, a wood stove, and a wall of unfinished blanks drying in rotation. The craftsman, now in his sixties, has been turning small wood tools since the late 1980s: chopsticks, hairpins, calligraphy rests, and eventually tea picks once the gongfu revival reached inland Henan in the 2000s.
The cherry comes from orchard prunings sourced within fifty kilometres of the workshop — fruit-bearing cherry, not ornamental, cut in winter and air-dried under cover for at least eighteen months before turning. Each pick is shaped in a single sitting: rough-turned, set aside for two days to let any residual moisture move, then re-cut to final profile, sanded by hand through four grits, and finished with cold-pressed walnut oil. No metal ferrule, no glue, no joinery — the whole tool is one piece of wood.
Michael keeps the order small on purpose. The workshop produces roughly forty picks a month between other commissions, and we take twenty. When a batch runs out, it runs out — we wait for the next firing of blanks rather than ask for volume. The maker prefers it that way, and so do we. Each pick ships with a short paper slip noting the month it was turned.