Many conceptions of sustainability, including Bruntland's now famous wording of sustainable development, sound an appeal to macro-scale management of economic, social, or ecological resources in the present, with the aim of maintaining the viability of these resources for meeting future needs. Allen et al (2003:26) point out that such an output-based approach to sustainability is prone to deemphasize the contexts of production, and they propose a definition of sustainability emphasizing supply-side systemic contexts. This paper adopts a context-based definition of sustainability, exploring popular discourse on Chinese tea culture, which appears to not only have survived into an age of modern industrial production, but to have flourished as a repository for natural aesthetics and socially meaningful values. Processes of tea production and consumption have an extremely long history in China, culminating in vernacular landscapes of human-altered ecological systems planted with regionally specific teas, and in philosophically idealized consumption practices such as gongfu tea. The material culture of "haute" tea consumption has historically entailed much human labor and artistic craftsmanship, and, in an industrial age, tea discourse appears to resist the shift from human-scale processes to mechanized, dehumanized ones. In this paper I argue that Chinese tea culture may constitute a case of 'vernacular' sustainability, a socially practiced philosophy of moral aestheticism that is resistant (though not immune) to mechanization and appropriation by forces of economic rationalization. Serving a social function similar to the Slow Food movement of European and Anglo countries, Chinese tea culture represents a discourse of leisure and human-scale meanings within a temporally and spatially dehumanized industrial environment. This exploratory study suggests that discussions on sustainability may benefit from consideration of social processes and production contexts that show resilience in the face of historical changes due to their merits as morally satisfying at the level of human experience.