There's nothing quite like the smell of fresh tea flowers, or a pinch of Pu'er tea to warm up a cold morning.

Nanluoshan (in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province) is a mountain in southwest China, long famous for its fine teas.

My travels to Nanluoshan were not for tea, but for paper.

This Dai village on Nanluoshan makes mulberry paper for wrapping the region's famous teas. 

Unlike plastic, a wrapper of handmade paper 'breathes' and lets the tea age gracefully over the years.

There were papermakers everywhere.

As in Thailand, most of the Dai papermakers were women.

There was even one who handled her drill as confidently as Rosie the Riveter – this was the first drill I've ever seen used at a paper factory.

We followed a woman with a wheelbarrow-full of paper pulp to a house which was filled with paper molds…

…from floor to ceiling – a long narrow shape I'd not seen before.

Turns out it's perfect for wrapping tea cakes.

After I bought 45 sheets of different papers for my China Paper Collection, I sat with my guide a while under a canopy, and watched the afternoon light fade through paper screens.

Naturally, You Know Who was watching over us, too.

Poster on the terrace of a Dai papermaker's home