The archive · Design & Visual · Product decision · 2024
Prosperous Chang'an sells Shaanxi tea on gold-and-silver Tang tea sets made modern
Shaanxi tea brand Prosperous Chang'an starts from the gold and silver Tang tea sets unearthed at Famen Temple, colliding heritage with modern graphics.
Shaanxi Silk Tea Road Biotechnology
What it had to solve
Prosperous Chang'an is a tea brand that sells and promotes the tea culture of Shaanxi, the region where a bright tea culture was born in the Tang Dynasty. Its imagery had to carry that deep heritage while still feeling modern and fashionable.
How it works
Prosperous Chang'an is a tea brand built to sell and promote the tea culture of Shaanxi, the region whose tea culture flourished in the Tang Dynasty. Its challenge was familiar to any heritage brand: the story is rich and old, but the image had to feel modern and fashionable rather than archival.
The creative starting point is a concrete treasure rather than a general ancient mood: the gold and silver tea sets unearthed in the underground palace of Famen Temple in Shaanxi Province. From those objects, Tang-dynasty imagery collides with modern, fashionable graphics, so the brand and its products are promoted with a visual language that carries history in a contemporary key.
D&AD recorded the work in its 2024 awards archive under Illustration. No sales or market data accompany the archive entry, so this case claims none; the transferable move is choosing one relic tied to the category and letting its collision with modern graphics carry the whole brand.
Why it lands
- A named artifact — Famen Temple's tea sets — gives the brand a specific origin story that generic 'traditional' styling cannot imitate.
- Colliding Tang imagery with modern, fashionable graphics lets the brand speak to buyers who do not think of themselves as traditional.
- Because the relic comes from Shaanxi itself, the identity doubles as a regional cultural story, which is exactly what the brand sells.
- Building the whole brand around one archaeological starting point keeps every graphic on-message instead of mixing random traditional motifs.
What it did
The brand gained a visual world anchored in a specific archaeological treasure — the Famen Temple tea sets — rather than in generic 'ancient China' decoration. D&AD recorded the work in its 2024 awards archive under Illustration; the page carries no sales figures, so the case rests on the design idea.
What you can take
An archaeological relic can anchor a brand: start from an artifact that belongs to your category's history, then collide old imagery with modern graphics so heritage looks current rather than curated.
Since then
The identity entered the D&AD 2024 awards archive under Illustration, where it remains documented. The archive records no sales or market-share figures, so this entry claims none; the lasting lesson is that a regional heritage brand can use a museum-grade artifact as its design anchor and still read as modern.
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