Note: this is a record I made in 2022 for the purpose of giving tea talks; it has sat idle as a prepared script for off-site talks. In these past years there has been nowhere to go give tea talks, and if I did not publish it, the ink would have faded. I will not revise it — I am simply releasing it as is, into the "Talking About Tea on Paper" series. This is the thirty-third article of my Talking About Tea on Paper series; click to read more Talking About Tea on Paper articles.
I am Lü Jianfeng. In 2008 I founded 51 Pu-erh Net, which did fairly well at the time. In 2011 I started making tea under my own brand, Zhongmu, and have since released well over a hundred teas; I am still launching new products. In 2015 I began crowdfunded tea and founded the brand Houyue. In 2018 I went to Dehong and co-founded Dehong Ancient Tea with teacher Shi Yilong. I have been making tea for thirteen years and am still learning; all teachers and experts are welcome to offer their guidance. I have written a series of articles called Talking About Tea on Paper, within which the small sub-series of tea-master biographies has spread widely and is still being updated; and I have made a video series called Old Lü Talks Tea, in which I try to tell everything I understand about tea — over a hundred videos, with updates recently being planned. All of it is available on the "Old Lü Talks Tea" public account; you are welcome to learn more.
Let us first look at a set of data:
According to 2021 data from Yunnan's forestry department, Yunnan's forest land area is 424 million mu (about 28.3 million hectares)! Yunnan's forest coverage exceeds 65%. What about the whole country? 23%. Now look at Fujian and Zhejiang: Fujian ranks first in the country, also above 65%, and Zhejiang is at 61%. You see — the main tea-producing regions all have very high forest coverage. The province with the largest tea-planting area in our country is Guizhou, exceeding 7 million mu, and it is said to be approaching 10 million mu soon; Guizhou's forest coverage also exceeds 60%. Could the next hotspot be Guizhou tea? Through forest coverage, I bring out the viewpoint of today:
## The Ecological Beauty of Ancient Tea Trees in Yunnan!
Now let us talk about today's topic.
I. The Tea Culture of Yunnan's Ethnic Minorities.
1. The Hani people's slash-and-burn cultivation
I know the Hani relatively well — not from books, but from chatting with Hani people, especially some of the elders. Hani men do not go out to work; they stay home and mind the children, and there is a reason for this. In Menghai the Dai live at the foot of the mountains, while the Hani, Lahu and Bulang mostly live up in the mountains — that was decided by strength. For example, if a Hani village was especially good and the Dai fancied it, the Dai would make the Hani feel they should move away, because the Dai wanted to live in that village. Unlike today, in those days there was no rule of law; strength alone decided everything. The Dai were the absolute rulers, so the Hani could only keep moving up into the mountains, because all the places suitable for living had been taken. And the Hani lived by slash-and-burn cultivation: to grow grain they would burn the mountain and then plant; after a few years the land lost its fertility, and they would find a new place and burn again. All of this work was done by the men, who would agree among themselves to go find land suitable for grain — perhaps on the other side of the mountain, requiring days of walking — and these people would not return until the grain harvest was finished. Those left in the village were the women, who minded the children and cooked. When the men came back, the household work was still done by the women; the men merely helped look after the children. Take hunting too: everyone went out in groups; a man counted as labor, and if you had none, contributing a dog would do. When the hunt ended, the prey was divided according to each one's contribution — and of course, the dog got a smaller share.
2. The Bulang, an ancient tea people
Academia generally agrees that the Bulang are one of the earliest tea-planting peoples in Yunnan; some say they were the very first people to plant and drink tea. According to the Annals of Guangnan County, in the fifth century BC tribes led by the Liao and Pu peoples formed the Gouding Kingdom, and the Gouding Kingdom abounded in tea. The Bulang also practiced slash-and-burn cultivation, like the Hani, but the Bulang also grew one thing in particular: tea. They would find mountain land near the village suitable for tea, burn off the ground, scatter tea seeds, and tea would grow. As the land around a village became less and less suitable for grain, they needed to relocate to a new place, closer to good grain land — and the tea trees of the former village were abandoned, while new tea trees were planted around the new village. And so patches of ancient tea trees accumulated in the mountains. This is also why, over the past decade or so, new plots such as Mintang in places like the state-owned forests deep in the mountains have kept being discovered.
3. The De'ang, whose everything revolves around tea
I came to know the De'ang in Dehong. In my view the De'ang are likely a branch of the Bulang — they have too many similarities. Of course, I am no expert on this, so I will not say more. The life of the De'ang people cannot be separated from tea: "birth tea", "coming-of-age tea", "gathering tea", "social tea", "courtship tea", "betrothal tea" — such tea customs accompany nearly every De'ang person through their whole life. The De'ang likewise planted tea trees densely near their villages, in front of and behind their houses; and when a village moved, they planted tea at the new one. When we surveyed in Dehong, we found that the ancient tea trees of many villages — including the gardens of the Dai, Jingpo, Achang and Lisu peoples — were with very high probability planted by the De'ang before them.
4. Tea customs of the minorities
Up in the Menghai tea mountains, local tea farmers all love roasted tea: they roast the tea until it is slightly scorched, then pour in boiling water — the taste is quite good, scorched aroma mingled with the tea's fresh fragrance. The most famous roasted tea is in Dali, where the Bai and Yi peoples love it most; those special clay roasting pots are mostly made in Dali. Dehong and Baoshan also have tea-drinking customs, but there they mostly drink green tea, also baked until faintly scorched — such as Moguo tea and Huilong tea. That is drinking tea — and there is also eating tea. At Laobanzhang, tea-leaf eggs cost 88 yuan a plate, and every visitor likes to order one. Tea-leaf pickles, tea stir-fried with all kinds of dishes — the minorities have always eaten tea. The De'ang sour tea, I believe, evolved directly from tea-leaf pickles.
5. Summary
Yunnan's ethnic minorities have always planted tea, drunk tea and eaten tea. From the customs of these several peoples, one can roughly conclude that most of Yunnan's ancient tea trees were planted by minority peoples such as the Bulang and the De'ang. Later, with the rise of the tea trade, all the minorities — and the Han as well — began planting tea. Those teas are what we today call ancient-tree tea.
II. How the Ancient Tea Trees Were Preserved.
I wonder if you have heard of "head-chopped tea"? "Head-chopping" has a long history. As early as 1953 it was first tested on Nannuo Mountain in Menghai, and later a fifty-mu dwarfing was carried out in Manzhen Village, called at the time the low-yield tea-plantation improvement experiment. From the very name of the experiment we can see that the purpose of dwarfing ancient tea trees was to increase output. Ancient trees that were not dwarfed mostly have only one to three trunks; they keep growing taller with a small crown, and the leaves they produce are very limited. Moreover, with age they gradually senesce, their budding vigor weakens, until finally they can sprout no new shoots at all. At that point the tree is dwarfed: the main trunk is cut at about 20 centimeters above the ground, and three or four to a dozen or more new shoots sprout and grow into new branches — the crown widens and output rises. The main forms of modification were girdling, stump cutting, heavy pruning and light pruning. How effective was it? According to a survey by the Menghai tea authorities, before modification an ancient-tree garden yielded 12.5 kilograms per mu; after modification the yield could reach as high as 169 kilograms per mu — a rise of more than tenfold. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the national agricultural, forestry, economic and trade authorities asked Yunnan to designate eight counties as export bases, and demand for tea surged. So beginning in Menghai, many ancient-tree gardens were "head-chopped". That is why the ancient tea trees you see today in Yiwu and many parts of Menghai have new branches only about thirty years old.
Mentioning head-chopped tea, we must again talk about Yunnan's minorities. Before 2000, Laobanzhang's tea was big and dark, yet it sold for considerably less than tea from other parts of Bulang Mountain; much Laobanzhang tea even had to be passed off as tea from other places to be sold. The Han and the Dai are extremely diligent and extremely obedient: when the government organized the dwarfing of ancient tea trees — the head-chopping — they carried it out to the letter, some even cutting everything down and planting new tea trees, for the sake of high yield. But the Hani, Lahu, Bulang and other minorities had no concept of diligence. They depended on heaven for their food and had no concept of saving money. In the great mountains of Yunnan, it is said that if you stick a carrying pole in the ground, by the second year it has grown into a tree — resources are so abundant that it bred a laid-back temperament in these peoples. For example, when the government handed out fertilizer and saplings free, they would sell them cheap as soon as they got them, trading them for wine to drink at home. Because of the "laziness" of these minorities, we have today's large-scale ancient-tree gardens — and this is also why Dai villages rarely hold large stands of ancient tea trees.
III. Why Are Ancient Tea Trees So Popular?
Nowadays many tea enthusiasts will neither buy nor drink anything that is not ancient-tree tea, demanding trees of such-and-such age, from this-or-that famous mountain. Overnight, famous-mountain tea prices took off: ancient-tree tea from non-famous mountains has broken 1,000 yuan per kilogram, and Bingdao Laozhai tea has risen from around 200 yuan in 2009 to around 80,000 yuan today — how many times is that? And the farmers are still proud; they may not even deign to sell to you. Why are ancient tea trees so popular? Let me analyze.
1. Low pesticide residue — safe.
Ancient tea trees grow on big mountains in the shape of proper trees, spaced generally more than two meters apart. A mu of terrace tea garden holds over two thousand tea trees, whereas a mu of ancient-tree garden mostly holds a dozen or so — gardens with several dozen are rare, and some have only a few trees to the mu. Moreover, ancient tea trees are all of great age. As we know, only trees over a hundred years old may be called ancient-tree tea. Over their long years these trees have weathered every kind of weather, even fire, and survived — so they need little human intervention and live well without pesticides or chemical fertilizer. From a food-safety standpoint, ancient tea trees offer more security.
2. The taste is softer and sweeter, with fine charm.
Let us first look at the polyphenol-to-amine ratio. According to data in the 2019 paper "Comparative Study on the Quality of Famous-Mountain Ancient-Tree Teas in Different Tea Regions of Yunnan" by Pu Shaoliu and other experts of the Menghai Tea Research Institute, the ratio in ancient-tree teas of the Menghai, Mengla (the six great ancient tea mountains) and Shuangjiang Bingdao regions all fall around 3–5, as in the figure below: 
Zhou Hongjie's Yunnan Pu-erh Tea, p.26, gives the ratio of Yunkang No. 10 as 10.94; Cheng Qikun's A Plain Analysis of Tea Chemistry, p.42, gives the ratio of Yunnan's improved large-leaf variety — i.e. small-tree tea — as 18.30. As we know, the higher the ratio, the more bitter and astringent the tea tastes; the lower it is, the fresher, brisk-er and sweeter. On the taste of ancient-tree tea I have written an article, Talking About Tea on Paper XV: The Light Tea Life of Yunnan's Ancient-Tree Teas; the interested may go and read it. All in all, ancient-tree tea tastes better.
3. Wild mountain character
We humans all came out of nature, out of the forest; the forest carries a scent that is familiar and comfortable to us. Take free-range chicken: however you cook it — even just boiled in plain water — it is extremely fresh; the chicken from the market is best made into spicy chicken, and its broth you could hardly drink. Tea from the forest carries a similar character, which I take to be wild mountain charm. This is precisely why our Houyue slogan uses the line "big-tree tea from the forest". A garden with good ecology should be inside the forest: pleasant to drink, smooth in body-feel, and naturally carrying an enchanting wild mountain character.
4. Within the "the older, the more fragrant" context of pu-erh, a brand-new way of drinking.
I entered the trade in 2008, when "the older, the more fragrant" was mainstream and few mentioned ancient-tree tea. The market's mainstream was drinking old tea; new tea was bought to be stored. I have drunk a great many old teas — Eighty-Eight Qing cakes, all kinds of "marked" teas, genuine and fake, from the hands of all kinds of masters — well over a thousand kinds in total. It was truly hard to find one I liked: that aged aroma separated from moldiness by a single sheet of paper was rarely pure, and most of them made me quite uncomfortable — including many old teas of today, most of which I still do not like. Of course, in those days I did not understand tea either. It was not until 2013 that I began to encounter ancient-tree tea — that secluded fragrance, that clear sweetness. I fell in love with it at once, and discovered that besides old tea, besides "the older, the more fragrant", pu-erh could be drunk this way, and had this kind of taste. The emergence of ancient-tree tea gave many drinkers of high-end green tea a substitute: high-end green tea is seasonal and should not be drunk in quantity, but ancient-tree pu-erh is different — infusion after infusion, drinkable over the long term, with different mountains offering different flavors. Add the cultural export of the minorities — song-and-dance peoples, the generous and drink-welcoming minority girls, the ancient tea trees deep in the mountains, all superb accompaniments to the tea — and on top of that ancient-tree tea's good taste, ample charm, and safe, worry-free drinking: these enthusiasts simply cannot put the cup down. And those devotees in turn influence more and more people around them.
5. High prices, amplified by the devotees.
Every spring I am out in the tea regions, and I also drop by Laobanzhang and Bingdao Laozhai, often bringing friends. Frequently there is nowhere even to park; I estimate the daily visitors must number in the tens of thousands, all outsiders coming on reputation. The appeal of tea is truly enormous! These devotees naturally post to their social feeds while on the mountain, and after returning home most will show off the Laobanzhang or Bingdao they bought — some even gather a few friends and hold a tasting session. Word-of-mouth spread has thus become the main force driving ancient-tree pu-erh upward. The famous mountains taste good, are famous, and have many buyers while output is limited — so prices kept climbing. And being expensive is another driver. Have you noticed that being expensive is an enormous form of promotion? An example: I got into Bitcoin in 2012 and urged people around me to buy, but very few bought then. Recently I have noticed many people buying — and on asking, they all say that once Bitcoin's picture reached thirty thousand US dollars they began paying attention and buying: because it was expensive, they recognized and affirmed its value. A digression: when I ran crowdfunded tea in 2015 I liquidated all my Bitcoin — my intestines are still twisted with regret. None of us probably buy Louis Vuitton — the extremely rich may ignore this — yet we all know LV. Why? Because LV is expensive. Once Bingdao tea broke ten thousand yuan a kilo, no publicity was needed at all: Bingdao tea would simply never be enough to sell, and only get more expensive.
Having spoken of the good side of ancient-tree tea, let me now speak of its chaos.
IV. The Chaos of Ancient-Tree Tea
1. Tree age
On tree age I have written two articles: Talking About Tea on Paper II: The Temptation of Tree Age 1, and Talking About Tea on Paper IX: The Temptation of Tree Age 2. The interested may go read them. Ancient-tree tea means arbor tea that has survived over a hundred years — but this is very hard to authenticate, so there is a thriving market in faked ages. For example, the Hekai Tea King Tree is Xibao No. 4 — meaning the fourth protected ancient tea tree of Xishuangbanna. The first time I went to see it, the plaque said over four hundred years; the next time, over eight hundred; and now it is over twelve hundred — in less than ten years, this tree has aged eight hundred years. Ridiculously, the Nannuo Mountain Tea King Tree — currently the oldest verified surviving ancient tea tree (the Bada one has already died) — is officially described at only eight hundred-some years. Of course, this Nannuo Mountain Tea King Tree is not the very tree that was studied back then; I have been to see that tree — it died once, its main trunk perished, and it regrew from the side. If even these Tea King Trees brazenly fake their ages, how much more so other trees. Those former small trees — as long as they looked like anything — have all shot up into "ancient-tree tea".
2. Faked ancient-tree tea
That is, what they show you is ancient-tree tea, what they sell you is small-tree tea; the cotton wrapper says ancient-tree tea, but it is really terrace tea passed off as such. This phenomenon is everywhere. Take a look at Taobao and Pinduoduo: Laobanzhang and Bingdao for ten or twenty yuan, in many listings, selling very well.
3. Faked famous mountains
It is said that the cotton wrappers of the pu-erh industry divide into two categories: half are Laobanzhang and Bingdao wrappers, and the other half are everything else. Yet Laobanzhang and Bingdao together amount to no more than a hundred tons — negligible against pu-erh's total output of two hundred thousand tons. With that many wrappers in circulation, you can imagine the frenzy of passing off ordinary tea as famous-mountain tea. What is sold online in quantity is the same in physical shops: almost every pu-erh shop sells Bingdao and Laobanzhang. In Lijiang's old town a tong (seven cakes) of "Laobanzhang" sells for a bit over a hundred yuan; and when gifting pu-erh, people feel embarrassed if it is not Laobanzhang or Bingdao.
4. The existing famous mountains tend to keep getting worse
Before 2012, when I went to Laobanzhang I would start from the Dai village of Manhena at the foot of Hekai Mountain, pass through Hekai Manmai and Mannong, on to Banpen, then to Laobanzhang — forest all the way. Now when I go, it is bare mountains all the way, with endless tea gardens. Take Laobanzhang proper: before 2015 the entire Laobanzhang tea output, small-tree tea included, was under fifty tons; now, by incomplete statistics, newly planted gardens exceed one hundred thousand mu, and Laobanzhang's total output has passed five hundred tons. Forests retreat, tea advances; the forest is gone, and the trend is that Laobanzhang is becoming less and less good to drink — which is also why, in making Laobanzhang tea, I have always insisted on choosing the plot. Look at Bingdao — it is the same. Because tea prices are so high, everyone opens up the mountains to plant tea; if big trees may not be cut, they strip the bark; output rises, but quality? The famous-mountain teas show a trend of getting worse, and we tea makers, when we discuss it together, are often full of anxiety — but as the saying goes, my heart was set on the bright moon, only the bright moon is set on the renminbi.
V. New Opportunities
The development of anything follows a parabola — ancient-tree tea is like that, and the famous ancient mountains all the more so. Laobanzhang and the other famous mountains will remain pearls, but new tea mountains, whose ecology has not been damaged, will become tomorrow's stars. Of course, the market will also force Laobanzhang, Bingdao and the other famous mountains back to the focus of ecology — is not the whole village of Bingdao Laozhai being relocated right now, letting the gardens return to forest? That is the trend of the times. This is the reason I went to Dehong. Dehong's forest coverage exceeds 70% and rises year after year. Many of Dehong's tea gardens are semi-abandoned: to pick tea you must push through grass and brush past other trees, and the tea's taste is superb — one sip and the wild mountain character comes straight at you. We are also looking for more places — returning to Yiwu, for instance, and seeking tea in the great forests. And we are delighted to see more and more tea farmers, guided by the government, paying increasing attention to ecology. I believe the future of ancient-tree tea will only get better and better.
VI. Can Upgraded Terrace Gardens Become Good Ancient-Tree Tea?
People often ask this question, and my answer is yes. I have visited many such gardens and made samples from them. My conclusion: if a terrace garden is thinned — cutting from over two thousand trees per mu gradually down to a few dozen — and trees are planted in and around the garden to restore a forest state, then after a dozen or so years its quality will improve dramatically. And if you give it time — several decades, say — once the micro-ecology is fully restored, that garden will be proper ancient-tree tea in both form and quality.
VII. What I Consider Good Tea.
On this I have written an article, Talking About Tea on Paper XIV: Ten Indicators of Ancient-Tree Ripe Tea — that article discusses ancient-tree ripe tea, but it really is my whole understanding of ancient-tree tea; my tasting makes no distinction by tea category. I have made tea for thirteen years and studied tea for thirteen years. The good tea in my eyes is also the tea I drink every day myself, and it has several traits, which I share with you here.
1. It must be smooth.
That is, when the liquor goes into the body it must be smooth — like pouring a cup of water into sand, dispersing at once. That kind of penetrating clarity makes a person especially comfortable; the stress-relief and chest-opening of tea-drinking are roughly this "smoothness". The opposite of smooth is stagnation — commonly a bloated stomach, a heady feeling, a limp body. I wonder if you have felt these. Smoothness needs much drinking and much experience to recognize. Smoothness is the first and most important indicator in my book: I have never drunk a tea of poor ecology that was smooth. As long as a tea is not smooth, however good the taste, it is hollow.
2. Completeness of mouthfeel
I divide mouthfeel into three segments — the front of the mouth, the middle-to-back, and the throat — which is easy to understand. Some teas, after drinking, have something only at the front of the mouth while everything behind is empty; some good teas register not only in the front and back of the mouth but even send coolness down the throat — what people commonly call throat charm. Such teas score well on oral completeness. Completeness of mouthfeel has another layer, which I call entry, lingering and residence. Some teas are fine on entry, but on lingering they are astringent, coarse, even numbing — after drinking you do not want another cup, and a dozen minutes later your mouth still feels tight, and you grow thirstier and thirstier: that is extremely poor residence. A good tea must be good at all three moments: clear and sweet on entry, good salivation and returning sweetness on lingering, and on the way home after drinking, your mouth still cool and your throat comfortable, almost longing to go back for another cup — that is tea with excellent residence as well. Tea with complete mouthfeel must feel complete in the mouth and complete across all three moments.
3. Liquor texture and aroma
The tea liquor I love should be round and full; it need not be ultra-fine, but it must have no burr-like roughness. The liquor should be smooth, should have body, and its aftertaste should be long. The temperature of the liquor — I do not mean the water temperature, but the feeling the liquor gives us. Hot water we can hardly drink in big gulps — it burns — but tea is different. Liquor that troubles us this way: good tea leans cool, so you can drink it while hot; at the same temperature, some teas feel hotter than drinking plain water, and I consider such teas bad. The aroma of tea should be slow and subtle, and the fragrance should be carried in the water. Aroma also has temperature: hot aromas are like poor baked red tea — too sharp, too direct; I dislike them. Cool tea aromas — like the finest Mintang or Yibang ancient-tree teas — drift slowly, coolly, like the scent of orchids, like gardenias, intoxicating.
4. Strong wild mountain character
Wild mountain character can be sensed, and it can be put into words. Let us return to the free-range chicken: we can easily taste that it differs markedly from the market chicken. If you ran lab tests, I believe many indicators of free-range and market chicken would be about the same; the difference lies in this character — the feeling is completely different. The corresponding character in tea is the wild mountain note. When you feel the taste of nature in the liquor — tea rich in wild mountain character, drunk into the body, delights our mouths and relaxes our bodies, as if the liquor holds something one is especially infatuated with. That feeling is wild mountain character: it captivates, it makes us drink cup after cup, and the more we drink, the more comfortable we feel. Tea with fine wild mountain character almost always comes with good imagery.
5. Imagery
Imagery is easy to understand: some people, at the sight of a young woman, feel the stirrings of love and begin imagining courtship, marriage, children — that is imagery. The imagery of tea is the subconscious sensation drinking tea brings a person. The phrase I hear most often is "I tasted the flavor of sunshine" — that is a kind of charm. Tea has charm; charm delights the body, and the body may present a picture. In my personal view, imagery is the supreme level of comfort in tea-drinking. And some bad teas come with unpleasant imagery, too. Drinking tea from the forest, I often feel as if I am walking in the woods — great trees standing overhead, birds calling and insects chirping at my ears, moist soil underfoot grown with wild grass. I have compared SGS test reports: teas that give this feeling all have excellent data. In the past I would tell colleagues of these feelings, and many said I was bragging, a charlatan; nowadays I rarely speak of them — I just quietly drink tea, make tea and sell tea.
VIII. Finally, let me throw out a question: is small-tree tea good?
I once ran some comparative experiments: within the same area, ancient trees are indeed better than small trees. But across different areas, small trees in the forest are far better than ancient trees growing in cornfields or in front of and behind houses. Houyue's teas fall into three grades: the top is the collect-and-taste grade, the middle the tasting grade, and the entry level is called the discussion grade. Our crowdfunded teas are mostly of this last grade — there are now thirteen crowdfunded teas, and ten of them are tasting grade, all blended from big and small trees, information we disclose openly in the product descriptions. "Tasting-grade ancient-tree tea" means tea that attains the quality of ancient-tree tea, though not necessarily pure ancient-tree material. This is my respect for small-tree tea; it is Houyue's recognition, through quality, of ecology. Better a small tree with good ecology than an ancient tree with bad ecology! The greatest charm of Yunnan's ancient tea trees lies not in their great age, but in the fact that most of them grow in the great mountains, in the forests — it lies in good ecology.
IX. Summary
Drinking ancient-tree tea, what you drink is ecology. Only good ecology produces good tea. Yunnan has more than six million mu of tea gardens, and many are undergoing ecological upgrades; most of these are not yet good tea, but in the near future, as the forest cover returns and the ecology improves, they will all become good tea.
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