This research investigates the relationship between tea trade and ongoing physical and symbolic changes in China's southwest frontier environment. By focusing on the landscape of what is deemed "ancient tea forest" (guchalin), I aim to understand the interactions among tea trees, entrepreneurs, the state, and an ethnic minority population (the Bulang). In this research, I also seek to address the resulting politics over tea related land-use practices in southwest China. I analyze the material and ideological components of the tea forest by examining ecological changes, market forces, and state interventions. In addition to conducting interviews and archival research, I have conducted intensive ethnographic research to engage in local Bulang villagers' everyday life in a context where the tea landscape in southwest China is symbolically and materially reproduced. Overall, my research enhances understandings of the relationship between development and environment under the market economy on frontier China today. Tea trade on China's southwest frontier has been unsettling, mobilizing, and re-assembling the connections between human actors and environmental elements. Therefore, the interactions between people and their environment resulting from tea production informs the dynamic (re)formulation of social and subjective identities on the frontier. Additionally, I aim to re-consider "frontier" as an analytic concept within the Chinese context. I argue that China's southwest frontier has been dilemmas between tradition and modernity, between territorial margin and connected space, and between nature and development. I use tea production as my lens to investigate these dilemmas, which have become the mechanism to shape and reshape the nature-society relations through peoples' incompatible desires, changing moralities, and cultural renovations.