We all know it: social networks always leave too much room for sensationalism. There’s endless space for anyone obsessed with sanctifying new brands and glorifying mind-blowing teas that promise an experience somewhere between spiritual awakening and a methamphetamine binge. A permanent pop-up of disposable enthusiasm. It’s the amusement park where anyone can feel like a prophet for a day, canonizing the newest square meter of the most remote village, where snakes, tigers, and giant beetles supposedly lurk ready to attack the tea pickers, only them, of course, not people practicing any other profession, before moving on without even bothering to stub out their cigarette in the ashtray of final verdicts.
Everything seems to shine, everything seems harmless, everything promises miracles, at least until you realize it was only a reflection, not the source. That’s life.
It has happened to me too: speaking too highly, too soon. But there is one terrain, one terroir, on which I’m not willing to make the slightest concession: Tủa Chùa.
From a mountainous rear area near the Điện Biên Phủ valley, where in 1954 the decisive battle that ended French colonial rule was fought, this region has become an enclave capable of producing surprisingly accomplished Pu’er teas. Many areas once considered marginal and reactionary, such as Tủa Thàng, turned into revolutionary bases, as they combined geographic isolation with strong social cohesion. The karst plateau, with its steep mountains and paths invisible to outsiders, offered natural refuge to high-ranking officials of the Việt Minh. They took shelter in the homes of Hmong villages, protected by the population’s collective silence.
The inhabitants knew the land intimately, guiding men, weapons, and messages along unmarked routes, avoiding French patrols and keeping the mountain areas connected to the Điện Biên valley. All of this unfolded in conditions of extreme poverty, yet they provided food, places to rest, and intelligence on enemy movements, accepting extraordinarily high risks. In those mountains, silence was a form of resistance, and the geography itself seemed to have taken sides.
Now, back to the tea.
If I had to explain to someone what true mineral, botanical, ancestral excellence means, if I had to make them understand what these trees are capable of, and why Vietnam today not only looks Yunnan straight in the eye but openly challenges its borders, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. I’d pour them this tea. No preamble, no rhetorical acrobatics, no captions.
The way this tea is evolving is sublime, truly the kind of harvest you get once every five years.
I’m sorry to say it won’t deliver the tragic depth of Marina Abramović’s gaze, the high priestess of emotional intensity descending upon us mortals to elevate us by staring into our eyes like a corneal topographer.
What it will give you is a perfect sip.
This is a sheng with an almost exasperated intensity, like an overexposed photograph that somehow works. It lingers on orchid notes, though not like Jingmai, those notes seem wrapped in a dense, almost brooding forest aroma, the kind currently fashionable to flaunt when talking about Guafengzhai, but here they feel more arrogant, they slide under your skin with a needle’s quiet, deliberate precision, an elegance that’s both unsettling and strangely pleasant.
On the palate it’s viscous, medium-bitter, with barely perceptible astringency. The huigan is quick, floral, so persistent it feels more like a reforming than a return.
This isn’t a tea for fragrance addicts or niche perfume obsessives.
The qi is the real point here.
It’s a tea for those who recognize the exact moment when something slips in and changes you.
You don’t keep drinking it just for the aroma, you do it because a part of you has already been pulled in, and now it wants to know what will happen if you keep filling the cup.
Usually, I would write about a place, a land, the wind disturbing the fragile balance of the hats of farmers bent by time and sciatica. I would use rhetorical tightrope acts that might seem almost contrived to some, or romantic and evocative to others. But this time I won’t do any of that, no recycled sensations, no stories about the battles in the Tây Côn Lĩnh mountains or about how this tea recalls that Eastern peace we like to import in small doses into our European afternoons, that peace found in watching Maggie Cheung walk under the rain while time slows down, when everyone holds their breath, diaphragm tensed, as absolutely nothing happens. Things that usually grant every tea a kind of added grandeur, a metropolitan dignity sweetened with a touch of neo-rural nostalgia.
I’m not John O’Hara, and I don’t think people care to see every banal gesture described as a moral battlefield. So, this is a sheng. We’ve more or less all arrived there. And if I stopped here, I’d already be more honest than most of contemporary gastronomic documentary.
But I believe this is one of those few Pu’er teas that doesn’t need me, or my words, or anyone else’s, to be understood. Roland Barthes saw in photography two fundamental aesthetic elements: the studium, the set of information one needs to know, and the punctum, the element that wounds, that seizes attention and couldn’t care less about the rest, about its translation into prose; it just arrives, contracted like a beast.
It’s in its wet leaves, tremendously fruity and earthy at once, in that quarrel between magnolia, orchid, dandelion root, and Tellicherry pepper that the punctum arises. Barthes would say it’s in that absurd moment of unconditional pleasure that meaning breaks and truth seeps through, like a development flaw on a film roll.
This ancient tall trees tea it’s a bomb wrapped in silk drapes, almost nervously delicate and at the same time powerful. It’s a sip of terroir served at a hundred degrees; it has everything that remains when you strip away the narrative. The texture is medium-soft; it tastes of pepper and wildflowers, white grapes, juniper, it tastes like that childhood photo with the grain too visible, the one you wish you had but that someone is now romanticizing somewhere on Netflix.
The qi leaves you with a strange calm, almost clinical. The huigan is excellent; the bitterness is low, the astringency absent. The persistence is long, the sip seems to linger there, clinging to the squamous epithelium of your throat like a gentle remorse.
When a person starts consuming a lot of tea, and at the same time begins spending significant amounts of money, creating those situations where every online purchase takes on, in their mind, the aura of a bid at Christie’s for a Rubens painting, sooner or later, the people around them will pose the classic question: “That 20-year-old tea, aged, stale, with a questionable aroma to many, costing $3 per gram, is it really worth that much?”
As I wrote in a previous article, we are all touched by the rough hand of “the psychopolitics of consumption.” Whether we like to admit it or not, price becomes a revealer of a kind of pseudo-truth, colonizing our sensations and emotions to the point that we start believing that the object bearing that price tag is somehow from a higher reality, a vehicle of a superior sensory condition.
In recent years, I’ve noticed a certain invasion of the market by cakes from producers like Xi Zi Hao, Bao Hong Yin Ji, Chen Yuan Hao, and all these boutique brands you’ll see featured in at least two or three posts a day on your Instagram feed. These aren’t brands that appeared yesterday, to be clear, but lately there seems to be a kind of viral obsession around them, adorned with a certain propensity for sensationalism.
During a tea session I attended a few days ago, many people expressed an almost frantic desire to purchase cakes from these brands, like Bingdao and Bohetang from these brands, which often sell for at least $1,500-2,000 per cake. The central discussions weren’t about their quality, but rather about how to access them: where to find the best deals, how to split the tea, as if divvying up the pages of a first edition King James Bible. At a certain point, that room full of tense faces had turned into a kind of collective purgatory, where everyone was trying to convince themselves they had enough credit to justify the expense and finally ascend. In that moment, we all could’ve been perfect subjects for an Eve Arnold photo series titled Misery and Desperation.
Now, setting aside this acute exposure syndrome toward certain brands, many were convinced that these teas would be a kind of revelation, finally pulling back the curtain on some mystical conspiracy, offering access to the long-hidden “truth of gushu”. These Pu’er teas are expected to be two or three times better than anything previously experienced, but at ten times the price. Throw in some old Red and Green Mark cakes, and you can add another zero to the figure.
So, is it really worth it? Judging by this ratio, apparently not. But if we followed this logic consistently, we’d never do anything but embalm ourselves while waiting for the final sunset.
So my answer would be: it depends on your income. If you’re not wealthy, live in a place where inflation is sky-high, and the price of a cake equals a month’s salary, then maybe you should think twice. For that same amount, I could buy an 1800s ceramic piece, plan a vacation, purchase an incredibly satisfying tea, and get my girlfriend a gift, all at once. The point is: while there are plenty of mediocre teas out there, there are also vendors offering both aged and fresh teas at human prices with truly excellent quality. A lot has changed in the past 10 years.
Why do I say this? Because over the past decade, I’ve simply come to understand that buying tea shouldn’t be a personal financial shipwreck.
It’s true that, like many other things, tea is subject to imitation behaviors. Many chase after a brand like starving wolves, simply because someone deemed “credible” for whatever reason says it’s good. The risk of confusing what we genuinely desire with what we’re unconsciously pressured to desire is always lurking, especially in an era where desires are not allowed to settle, to decant, to shed the tension of ownership imposed by a third party. A hobby always risks becoming a vice, a dependency. But tea doesn’t have to be that. We need a lateral approach, not in opposition to the market logic, but in deconstructing it and using it more consciously.
Mixing a bit of Baudrillard with a touch of Byung-Chul Han, we get an answer to this exhausted system of tasting, not of tea, but of signs. By always chasing the newest tea, the most expensive one, the one from the most remote and romantic village, fueling our hunger for the “authentic taste”, we risk entering into the realm of simulation, where the experience isn’t real but positional. One drinks something not for the experience itself, but to feel like someone in comparison to others, to position ourselves next to those who told us this tea would open our minds. Only to eventually realize, of course, that it’s just tea. Most of the time, it will always just be tea, excellent, magnificent even, but no price or opinion will dictate how much it will truly move you, or how good or special you’ll find it.
With time, you might discover that the most special, moving teas, you won’t even remember how much you paid for them. But your spouse will remember that -$2,700 transaction on June 10, 2013, for 357 grams of an obsession even you can’t explain. They’ll remember it better than your wedding anniversary, regardless of how wealthy you are. In that moment, You, Me and Dupree starts to seem like an overly optimistic romantic comedy compared to your personal film: You, Me, and a 2006 Yang Qing Hao Chawangshu, a title too long for Netflix, and too depressing to laugh at, accompanied by the muffled sound of the kettle and the silent judgment of someone who loves you despite everything. DESPITE everything.
On top of that, there’s a mechanism I find frankly perverse. Maybe it exists, maybe it’s just a product of my twisted, overly analytical mind, fueled by neurotic narcissists and the wrong reads, but it might be interesting to consider what Zygmunt Bauman described as planned obsolescence. According to this concept, a prepackaged emotional state is created, leading to affirmations like: “This tea will be the one.” “This time I’ll understand.” “This time I’ll be worthy of grasping ancient tree Pu’er.” “This time… this time…” and so on.
This generates a renewable insecurity, where every piece of information, every certainty, has an expiry date. You feel the need to try an endless number of ultra-expensive teas, each one meant to construct a kind of symbolic refuge. It’s a sneaky and refined mechanism, if you think about it. It creates a form of outsourced desire, where you move from wanting to know to desperately seeking new stimuli and confirmations, eventually imposing upon yourself the need to desire, becoming a co-author of your own subjugation.
You’re not forced to want the $2,000 tea. You convince yourself that it’s your mission, because you need to feed that pit bull that is your craving for apparent knowledge.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone, but I think it helps explain many of the neuroses people have in the tea world, especially at the beginning, and particularly when they don’t have a lot of money to spend.
I’ve tried many of those teas over the years. Some were excellent and are now gone forever, many I don’t even remember drinking, and others are still there, parked like a lover in the usual hotel room, who’ll never see you walk in again. That’s because, more often than not, I end up choosing something comforting and far less expensive, something that doesn’t require a transcendent atmosphere to enjoy a dozen infusions. Something that, for many reasons, some even objective, I enjoy more.
I don’t think I’ve reached that “ethics of conscious consumption” Bauman might have described, but I’ve simply chosen to be happy drinking great tea without going broke. I’ve discovered there is no upstairs level of happiness hidden behind those cakes. Their Qi is not an LSD trip, their huigan won’t unlock some little door to enlightenment, like a Mulholland Drive sequence where everything suddenly makes sense and terrifies you, and their great health benefits won’t cure your diabetes.
For some, seeing one of those ultra-fancy cakes resting on an expensive rosewood table is akin to a primal carnivorous urge, like spotting a wounded animal lying on the ground. But I think I’ve become disenchanted with that kind of thing, I’ve, shall we say, gone vegan.
These days, I find much more pleasure in discovering unknown names, new vendors, trying teas from new regions and countries, things without pedigree but with substance, without external contamination, without info sheets or anything that triggers my annoying jaw tic that accompanies every sip of a $50/session tea.
Maybe that’s what marks the transition from novice to some kind of post-adolescent maturity in tea drinking. Or maybe it’s just the prelude to the collapse of my mental health, and soon I’ll be sipping mallow infusions in the grip of some hormone-fueled delirium. But I’ve found that this approach lets me evaluate teas more freely, more objectively, and in many ways, even more scientifically. And above all: it’s made me happier.
If you ask many people what their favorite production area is, they’ll probably start listing off famous terroirs, Bingdao for its body, Laobanzhang for its qi, Naka for its fragrance, and some remote shack in a forgotten Yiwu village, which never hurts to name-drop. In short, a litany of names, as if it were a medical prescription for some trivial pathology to be handled with grave care. Or perhaps just another way to show how worn out the magnetic stripe on their credit card has become.
Jinggu likely won’t even cross their lips, not even by accident. This area is surrounded by mountains on three sides, an enclave where the best gardens are often inaccessible, and where the obsession with naming every single rooftop (as in Yiwu) is quickly anesthetized by a lack of roads and the even greater lack of desire to build them. Here, not even the clunky two-ton electric behemoths at the service of Western merchants can climb their way up.
I agree that vast expanses of flat land, dull stretches of agricultural functionality, are today brutally carpeted with Da Bai Cha, as in the flatlands of Wen Shan Ding. A cultivar that acts like a funerary carpet, its tea merely a collateral damage, a distillate of hardship and credit requests, with a hint of bank loan in the aftertaste. But if you start climbing and forget all that, you’ll reach over 2,000 meters at Kuzhu Shan. There, ancient trees stretch in swathes; in some spots, they’re even Teng Tiao, like in Banuo, but with a slightly different aromatic profile, less delicate, more fragrant, impactful, and mineral. Less mannered, and more Felliniesque, to put it simply.
Some time ago, I met a Pu’er expert, a merchant from Lincang whose main business revolved around the Fangcun market. I asked him why he thought people considered teas from Jinggu less worthy, almost like children of a lesser god, tolerated but avoided, like the uncle with a drinking problem at Christmas dinner. He was a big man, with hands the size of shovels. He stared at me for a moment, with his huge, isochoric pupils, maybe the largest I’ve seen on someone from Yunnan, wide like those of an Australian owl photographed by Joel Sartore, performing tiny mechanical micro-adjustments every time you locked eyes with him, as if missing an autofocus. He answered in monosyllables, he looked like someone who read Anna Karenina just to root for Vronsky. He smiled too, but it seemed like his facial muscles were slightly jammed from decades of monsoon rains. And yet, he was one of the most knowledgeable people on Pu’er I’ve met.
It took him a while, then he said something, I don’t quite remember what. I was too busy noticing the irrelevant details I’d later include in this article. But the meaning behind his cocktail of anthropology and Moutai was clear: Jinggu was guilty of not being immediate enough. Too real, too unavailable. Add to that the fact that the era when people chased uniqueness has been over for a couple of decades. They discovered the villages of Yiwu, Laobanzhang, Bingdao, a few others in between, and the punch bowl quickly ran dry. Because, you see, he said, the markets want exclusivity. The consumers who arrive in polished shoes at the edge of the forest, who slip on plastic sandals before posing in front of an ancient tree, are looking for tea like they’re looking for sushi in Berlin.
And he was right. Some want only the illusion of a mysterious narrative, not the truth of the land. They prefer a tea that behaves like a cool, aloof actor, properly trained to play the silent type, the tormented one, the aged-in-a-hut-with-a-hidden-past role, rather than someone, or something, that simply tastes like what it is.
Jinggu teas aren’t for complexity maniacs. They’re rather blunt, direct, break through your guard with a few solid punches, enveloping you in sweetness and asserting themselves through their huigan and bodily sensation.
In the Kuzhu and Tang Fang Liang Zi areas, you’ll find real forest coverage where tea is harvested, like some portion of Yiwu, the northwestern edges of Laos and Vietnam, or the forested zones of Guogan in Myanmar. Here, the trees grow close to and inside the forest. The soil is clay-based with a good amount of rock, confirming the tea’s mineral and sweet character. The plants are spaced well apart, and younger trees are left to grow naturally. You won’t see any drastic pruning, only containment cuts.
It’s a complex terroir. In one cup, you’ll think you’ve stumbled into Jingmai. Drive twenty kilometers and drink again, you might swear you’re tasting Yiwu. Walk another ten, parched and hopeful, and you’ll find bitter cultivars whose huigan is so forceful, so magnetic, it makes some Bulang teas feel like passive-aggressive outbursts by comparison.
Here, like in Laoman’e, bitter and sweet varietals sometimes coexist in the same natural amphitheater. The former, known as kucha, often dominates the more remote slopes, but it’s never overwhelmingly bitter, never out of place or chaotic. It soon turns its cheek to a wild sweetness, like a fist on the table that prepares the caress. If the sweet variety is a well-composed, harmonic melody, the bitter one is drama and catharsis, leaving every door open for further development. These are teas that, even years later, remain an enigma. Tasting them again over time is like revisiting a neighborhood in daylight where you partied in the night before. You barely recognize it, and the sunlight seems to restore a grace you previously failed to notice.
In both cases, what stands out is an oily, umami-like sip and a genuine, full-bodied chaqi, it feels like it thins your tissues, filling your chest and pushing every muscle fiber up against your skin. A tea with a soul that doesn’t scream, but also doesn’t compromise. A tea you don’t expect, and which, especially in the case of ancient trees, hasn’t been tamed to soften its impact.
Southwest of Jinggu Town lies Jiu Tai Po, one of the most expensive and coveted areas, graced with the elegance of something that knows how to stay hidden. Few signs, no selfie points, no desire to be disturbed more than necessary. The village itself, small and vaguely adrift in agricultural amniotism, has little tea directly surrounding it; most of it is in the forest zone, along the ridges or on the opposite slopes. Road access is practically nonexistent, and like Guafengzhai, it takes hours of hiking to reach the tea trees. These aren’t roads for people in Italian leather shoes, and a camo cap won’t get you to the top. The landscape feels like a James Cameron set, shot with Kubrick’s cinematography and directed by a mood-swinging park ranger. There, the leaves aren’t picked by good boys, but by madmen, neurotics howling at the moon, yelling into the western wind, and probably monks armed with faith and an unearthly amount of patience. Climbing up there feels like trying to earn a glance from Maria Callas, flailing pathetically to grasp the corner of her eye, she ignores you, and you thank her anyway.
In recent years, Jinggu has had its big moments, times when even the cynics had to admit that yes, even from those mountains often relegated to Act Two of the Pu’er narrative, something remarkable could emerge. Like the Pu’er from Tang Fang Liang Zi by Farmer Leaf, especially the single tree series that reads like an elegant lithograph set by De Chirico; the 2017 Chawangdi or the 2016 You Shang from Chawang Shop, perhaps among the Western forerunners of Jinggu’s nouvelle vague, to the 2007 Shang Pin by Xi Zi Hao or the old relics from Changtai, old-school, decadent, like an old house with silk on the walls, with the scent of leather and creaking parquet.
But today, I’ll focus on two other excellent sheng Pu’er by Thés Terre de Ciel, both from old-ancient trees.
TdC Spring 2024 Xiao Jinggu Puerh des Cimes
I’ve always had a soft spot for the Pu’er of Jinggu, for their remoteness, their distance from the inflated rhetoric about the primordial nature of its landscapes, for from the market wars over taste profiles and terroir cred. Jinggu teas owe nothing to expectation; they answer only to themselves.
This is one of those teas. The kind with no prefabricated image, no guiding archetype. Nothing to anchor your imagination, no Muse whispering interpretation in your ear, as Hesiod might have hoped. Just you and the leaf. No crib sheet. No narrative. Only the moment.
The leaves are twisted, dark green. The sip is viscous, with a round, sticky umami reminiscent of chicken broth from a market stall in Chongqing. There’s a sweetness too, unopposed and undistracted, a sensory monologue rich in subtext. The huigan lays itself across the tongue like a seamless silk blanket. Bitterness exits the discussion early.
The Qi is delicate, but it moves under your skin, subtly shifting your posture, your pace, your pulse. The salivation it provokes becomes a kind of gustatory capital. The sensation is almost organic-minimalist, like an alabaster vase with no sharp edges, revealing more intentions than it cares to admit. The intensity of the peach note approaches something like an orchestral delirium, building in a near-psychedelic crescendo, and that out-of-the-ordinary umami makes it feel less like a beverage, and more like a pre-dessert at L’Arpège.
TdC Spring 2023 Kuzhu Shan
This Pu’er from Kuzhu Shan seems like it emerged straight out of a William Morris wallpaper, drawn after two glasses of fine Vin Jaune. Alienated, eclectic, remote, saturated with organic vitality. The dry leaves exude hints of light tropical fruit, citrus, and wildflowers. As expected, this is not a tea that lingers in a labyrinthine dimension of complexity, but that’s not the terrain where Kuzhu teas show their hand.
The true opera magna takes place in the mouth, which becomes the theater for a clash and debate between a pronounced yet agreeable bitterness and a sweetness that follows quickly, almost antithetical to it. It’s a generative tension that drives this medium-bodied sip to evolve, to layer itself, each new sensory stratum tearing apart, cannibalizing the one laid down before it.
The tasting unfolds as a kind of sensorial acceleration, like a Baz Luhrmann film, abrupt cuts, frenetic pacing, a hyperactive montage, leading to a terribly refreshing, surreal sensation with an unmistakable note of tonic water.
It’s a Gin & Tonic stripped of its damnation, as Nick Carraway might say while struggling with his addiction. This is a vividly alive liquid, whose finish is so enduring it seems pointless to measure. It unwinds slowly on notes of ginger beer, candied lemon peel, and rhubarb, while your tongue’s receptors are still stunned by the mineral lash it dealt twenty minutes earlier.
Usually, when I drink a Pu’er, I think about its aging potential, its price-to-quality ratio, I imagine derivatives and equations, risk and return curves, asking myself whether it’s better to keep it for the medium or long term. I make a lot of projections, hypotheses, even metaphysical guesses.
But the truth is, this is one of the few teas where none of that matters. I drink it because it’s simply really good. Whether it lasts twenty years or disappears in two days, for once, I really don’t care.
In Sanmai, the harvest embodies collective power, it remains there, sedimented, like the slow burn of an inexhaustible cultural fire. It reemerges in the ritual act, with the tension that grows as the air’s humidity rises, escalating like a migraine that starts at the base of the skull and radiates to the eyes. Hope mingles with the fear that the rain might arrive at the wrong moment, transforming the river into a clay demon and the crumbling mountain into an army of rock.
Here, Mengsong seems to speak through the very stones of the houses. And what it says is not just a verb numbed by modernity, but an echo that comes from far away, from a larger world, perhaps lost, but still alive in the people. It kindles itself on the walls, becomes flesh, becomes identity. The fragile power of its tea is like the fire in Ella Fitzgerald’s voice resonating in the aorta. You cannot ignore it.
These are not odes nor exercises in writing. This is ground zero of the attempt to understand. To truly come into contact with a tea that hides in sensory detail, that, like its land, wears you down and demands understanding at the edges of perception.
This danzhu from Thés Terre de Ciel is a truly unexpected tea, unsettling in some respects. We are often accustomed to teas from Naka, Benglong, Bameng, with their floral, sometimes fruity, gentle characters. But Sanmai doesn’t play with gloves on. It is a clean, precise, yet powerful tea. The Qi is profoundly forest-like, dense, almost physical; it seems to influence every mechanoreceptor. You feel it in your hands, your legs, your stomach. It seeps into the nerve plexuses, as if the body were enhancing the perception of every distal extremity, of each of its boundaries.
The huigan is long, incessant. It lingers. The bitterness is there, but it doesn’t last. It retreats quickly, making way for a mineral, almost effervescent, electric sensation that settles on the sides of the tongue, along with a sweetness that makes no compromises. Salivation is continuous, rhythmic, like waves that come without pause. Like the crowd at Glastonbury, a constant flow. Every infusion up to the twelfth is a tactile theater, alive, dense, full. No drop, no faltering.
With A Comparative Journey Through Two Traditional Viet Sun Sheng Pu’er
When I first saw Steve’s photos, his Vietnam, made of fiery red sunsets, emerald pastures, and motorcycles whose tire treads were mere memories, I was left hanging in a sense of emptiness, of existential incompleteness tied to never having visited those places. Looking at those shots felt like peering into a parallel world, embraced by a sort of ontological nostalgia.
The snapshots of Tả Củ Tỷ, the “Big Rice Field,” reveal the truth of a borderland world, of earth and blood, behind the major cities, whose distant lights appear like a sarcastic smile with pearl-white teeth. Then the horizon arches, growing increasingly vertical, rising further along the crumbling clay arteries, beyond the rice paddies, moments ago drained, now swollen with rain and reflecting the vastness of the sky.
Here, every tree, every tea leaf, every sensory experience is an imperfect shadow of an eternal idea. This is where one of the best Pu’er teas in Vietnam is made, loaded with a near-theological sincerity, vibrant in every vintage, soft, flowery, and endlessly mineral. The shengs of Tả Củ Tỷ are like the Rieslings of the Mosel, a form of resistance against the trials the gods impose through the elements. They express the same minerality and layered memory. But while Riesling whispers sweet notes and sings praises like a Romantic poet on a summer evening surrounded by Viennese Jugendstil, the Pu’er of Tả Củ Tỷ elegantly drags you down a muddy mule path under relentless monsoon rain. In both, there is the same sharp and ruthless beauty, but whereas the Mosel wines evoke the rarefied skies of Chagall, suspended in uncorrupted blue, in Tả Củ Tỷ the image offers no redemption, it demands confrontation. Time here doesn’t pass, it presses. The landscapes are those painted by Turner, but not the sublime, ethereal artist of the Dover sea, rather the feverish, visionary Turner of his final years, where light shatters into curls of shadow and smoke, and the scene dissolves into an intensified, nebulous inner reality.
The province of Lào Cai hosts a pedological diversity of rare complexity, the result of interactions between lithology, comprising metamorphic and sedimentary bedrocks, and a harsh topography shaped by steep slopes and variable altitudes ranging from the Red River’s lowlands to peaks shrouded in mist. In this living landscape, far from documentary clichés, ten major soil groups intertwine, distributed into around thirty subcategories, reflecting an extreme variety of geomorphological, climatic, and land-use conditions. In this mosaic, most fall into the categories of alluvial soils, minimally developed, fertile, fine-textured, laid across the Red River’s floodplains. As elevation rises, submontane zones host deep ferralitic soils, with aggressive pedoenvironments and reddish-brown hues. Then come humic soils on red-yellow parent rock, which inhabit the gentler slopes of the Sa Pa and Bắc Hà districts, ideal for mountain orchards and medicinal plants, the same ones that Dao grandmothers will grant you for a spider bite, heartbreak, or to recover quicker from the drunken night before. Higher still, where the air thins, the sun burns your skin, and geology shifts from academic subject to a lesson in humility, you find the brown, acidic forest soils typical of high-altitude tea forests, marked by thick organic horizons and excellent water retention, where the labor is real, marketing fades, and matter begins. The higher you go, the more essential the soil becomes, and the mountain strips you of every excess you thought you needed.
Since ancient times, the region now known as Lào Cai has been a living tapestry of peoples from the H’Mông–Dao (including Mông, Dao, and Phù Lá) and the Kra-Dai groups (including Tày and Nùng). The Phù Lá migrated from Yunnan during the waves of the 15th and 17th centuries and opened the Lào Cai–Hekou pass, a crossroads for southern Chinese merchants and Tibetan fugitives, military settlers, and Tonkinese textile makers. Salt, tea, silk, and livestock crossed gorges and cliffs towards the Red River Delta, in exchange for rice, gourds, rare spices, and La Chi cotton fabrics. The trade route stayed open for five centuries, until the war with China in 1979. Tả Củ Tỷ and the entire Bắc Hà highland area have always been a “slippery edge” of the Vietnamese empire: formally part of Đại Việt, but in practice governed by local clan leaders and traversed by cross-border trade routes. Only with the expansion of the Nguyễn dynasty and, later, the arrival of the French, did state control become more pervasive. But that’s another story.
The forests of Tả Củ Tỷ possess a mad, honest allure. The color palette feels like something conjured by a cosmic hangover, while the mist moves slowly, like cigarette smoke drifting in a closed room. Its radiance isn’t the kind choreographed by a cheerful smile or Caribbean hues, but rather the disarming kind of beauty of a woman who’s cried all night and then looks at you at dawn, bare-faced. A fleeting moment of rare grace, allowed to linger briefly in the interlude of suffering, the kind of incorruptible, visceral visual rapture that doesn’t let you lie.
These dusty clay paths have been trodden by pack leaders, smugglers, and warriors. They’ve witnessed rites of passage and the initiations of Dao and Mông shamans, the veneration and sacred songs of the Tày, and offered shelter for markets and negotiations, for secrets traded with Xôi ngũ sắc, and for boisterous jokes between bowls of Thang Cọ and glasses of rice wine.
From this thread of bare earth echoes the sound of an absolute beauty that refracts through the contingent, like a bridge between the transitory and the infinite. I could be among them now, being filmed as I say that it is in the resilient rurality of these villages that Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit unfolds, that is, a spiritual disposition of letting-be, an openness to the essence of things, and, as he interprets in his Parmenides, how it reveals itself through history and daily life. But at some point, a scooter would honk to urge me out of the way, and it would be right to do so. So, thousands of kilometers away, I conclude by saying that there, people have never betrayed their own history, even while embracing change, reminding us that the truth of a place is not measured by the order of its exotic scenery, nor through a mere anthropological lens. Especially not in that land, Vietnam, daughter of the sky, immersed in the dreamlike dimension of its eternity.
On the left: Tả Củ Tỷ Sheng Pu’er Autumn 2023, medium aged, old and ancient trees On the right: Tả Củ Tỷ Sheng Pu’er Spring 2024, old and ancient trees
Viet Sun Tả Củ Tỷ Sheng Pu’er Autumn 2023
The autumn version comes from a mixture of medium-aged, old, and ancient trees growing at different altitudes and on diverse soils. It presents itself with a mature register, more oxidized, and the difference from the spring version is indeed perceptible. The autumn leaves are darker, as confirmed by the liquor, a decidedly golden hue, with shades that recall Turner’s Goethe’s Theory, to stay on theme. While the wet leaves retain a line of continuity with the orchid and apricot notes typical of the spring harvest, here honeyed tones and hazelnut hints emerge more clearly, intertwined with musky nuances, dried fruit and pan-fried greens memories, with lightly buttery accents.
Although vibrant, the sip is clearly more fragile, with a more hesitant body compared to the spring tea. Its huigan is more restrained and immediate, with sharper astringency, although the impression remains of a sweet brew with well-calibrated bitterness. Rather than floral aspects, the palate leans more toward raisin, apricot, and unmistakably honeyed flavors. The mouthfeel is less viscous, with more modest intensity and persistence, yet it remains decidedly interesting for this theater of contrasts between warm, comforting fragrances and still grassy notes, between roundness and sharpness. It is a tea that certainly holds aging potential, but is already quite enjoyable in its youth.
Viet Sun Tả Củ Tỷ Sheng Pu’er Spring 2024
I believe there are four essential elements that make a Pu’er good, if I were pressed to summarize: aroma, the taste of the mountain, excellent viscosity and huigan. And all of them are here. There are no substantial altitude differences compared to the autumn counterpart, but here we have leaves only from old and ancient trees. They appear lighter, less reddened, the liquor takes on a straw-yellow hue, and the aroma recalls that of orchid, not the florist’s kind, but the wild one you stumble upon between the cracks of limestone, with scents of an intensely floral field and apricots.
Framing it is a very light smoky note that fades quickly over the course of the session, while a constant forest-like tone remains, along with wet stone elements that greatly define the olfactory texture. The character is decidedly more intense, more subtly grassy and floral, geared toward evolution over time. The liquor is beautifully smooth, sustained by light bitterness and astringency, which pave the way for a huigan that is reactive, quick, enveloping, and progressively expands from throat to palate.
As the session continues, it constantly reminds me of some Pu’er from Gedeng, but even more boldly floral and with a distinctly mineral signature. The huigan and the persistence of the aftertaste are undoubtedly the pillars of the tasting experience, two traits that make you forget many gushu from beyond the border.
Note: All the stunning photos of the passages were taken by Steve(Viet Sun)
The postmodern saga of Changtai is a mélange of nostalgia and decadent retrospection—a journey that began as an escape route, full of fleeting glimmers and vibrant lights, from the state-dominated gloom of the ’80s, soon became a conceptual reimagining of State Road 9, with its kilometers of pitted asphalt and half-lit motel signs sliding anonymously past the car window. They were riding the Pu’er epic, where every tong was marketed as if it were the Rosebud of Citizen Kane, that elusive treasure everyone sought to understand and possess. Nowadays, according to many aficionados, the tale of Changtai resembles the narrative of Bas Jan Ader’s brazen, smiling bike ride right before his humiliating crash. “If you want Changtai, look for it before 2005…”—one of the most overused phrases of the past decade. But is that really true?
Founded in ’99 in Yiwu by the will of Chen Shihuai, Changtai began selling its tea under the brand Yi Chang Hao, carving out a niche much like an indie rock band holding what seemed to be the perfect record, before the industry ruined everything. After YCH, they went on to produce numerous successful series sourced from single terroirs, such as Chen Hong Chang and Chang Tai Hao—exclusive teas crafted to last, to age like the finest Chateau Margaux. Yet, a few years later, something broke.
The Pu’er market of the 2000s was not unlike the realm of contemporary art: suddenly, money flooded in, investors arrived, critics lost their impartiality by getting drunk with the artists, and everyone wanted a slice of the cake. Demand exploded, prices soared, tea was even planted at lower altitudes, and factories ramped up production. Pu’er was no longer merely a tea, it had transformed into a financial asset.
In 2004, the factory reorganized as Changtai Tea Group, and with it came a change in approach: economies of scale took precedence, there was a greater reliance on plantation-grown material, more commercialized sourcing, less meticulously managed fermentations, and a reduced attention to detail. The overarching idea was to produce volumes, to churn out new batches for collectors who scarcely understood what they were buying—all while fierce competition for the best leaves intensified. Quality became diluted, much like a Warhol reproduced ad infinitum.
At the onset of my own economic tragedy, when I first began acquiring cakes, I, too, partly embraced this notion.
Comparing a Yiwu from ‘99 with one from 2006 felt like plunging from one metaphysical plane into another. The former was silky, layered, opulent and clear, while the latter was sparse, tediously sober, its complexity shackled by an almost ascetic organoleptic austerity and a finish that fizzled out too quickly, like a film abruptly cut before the climax. Yet over the years, I questioned whether this was universally true for all Changtai teas and how much weight these few general observations really carried—perhaps too cursory to be definitive. Thus, I granted them another degree of judgment.
I compared dozens of Changtai cakes each year—an obsession, really—and indeed, something had shifted, at least in trend. However, about five years ago, as I revisited that graveyard of samples I had set aside, I was stunned. The productions between 1999 and 2003 were undoubtedly remarkable, but those of 2005 and 2006 were not so far removed from their predecessors. I mean, hundreds upon hundreds of grams tasted in blind comparisons over ten years, two epochs that were supposed to be worlds apart and with an extra zero in the price tag, should have belonged to entirely different existential planes. But they weren’t, or at least not as much as public opinion, and my own mind, insisted. Production had indeed changed; however, certain elements of those iconic batches survived the onslaught of serial reproducibility, escaping the cynical, clinical gigantism of enormous, hypertrophic factories. Although these later productions underwent adaptations that created some detachment from their predecessors, cakes like the one in the photo, and others from 2005 and 2006, cannot, simply by that fact, be equated with the banality of a uniform proliferation, the child of that industrial era so often lamented.
This supposedly inglorious decline was cemented when a course correction was made, delineating a sociological divide between tradition (what peoples craft for themselves) and folkloric reproposition (destined for mass consumption), which, though appealing, remains distant from the truth that governs the opus traditum, the craftsmanship of remote ancestry. But how much truth lies in all of this? How much tradition truly remained in Changtai after 2004?
What shocked me most was the disparity in storage conditions among the various references, a factor that skewed the objectivity of judgment far more than any real qualitative gap. The cakes from the end of the last century through 2003 are genuinely of a high caliber, achievements that later productions can hardly aspire to match. In the 2003–2005 period, I found no absurd differences, certainly not enough to justify the price differentials from one year to the next. Often, excessively humid aging had irreparably ruined even excellent signatures—like a ’99 Yi Chang or a Mr. Wang Red Chang Tai Hao—trivializing their brilliance.
Therefore, I believe that the environment in which these cakes have spent their lives is far more important than determining whether a 2005 Chen Hong Chang measures up to one from 2000, and that much of their economic and organoleptic value lies precisely there—in the climate, in the place in which they have dwelled—probably more than in the origin of the leaves, which counts for nothing compared to a twenty-year period spent in a humid warehouse, left to sour and reduced to nothing more than a basement squeeze.
Moreover, finding well-preserved cakes to make such comparisons has become increasingly rare. Therefore, my modest piece of advice—if you haven’t sampled what you intend to buy beforehand—is to drink; take 2005 cakes without prejudice, provided they come from a reliable source. It is not entirely true that quality plummeted drastically after 2004; these issues emerged slightly later, and I may expound on the reasons in a subsequent article. In any case, if you are lucky, you’ll have secured a small masterpiece at a quarter of the price—one that, with high probability, isn’t a fake. If things don’t go your way, you’ll have gained a daily drink that is surely better than having burned a fortune, blindly thinking you’d closed a deal for a Romanée-Conti that, in reality, tastes like an old fisherman’s boot; or worse, a counterfeit, because the seller’s reliability wasn’t factored into the equation.
Lao Man Er, a brand many are likely familiar with, produced this cake in 2007 using old trees leaves from the Banzhang area. I doubt it includes LBZ or Lao Man E, and I equally doubt there is a significant share of XBZ, but there is something intriguing here. Beyond the brands and trends, there are things—or teas, in this case—that offer a window into a space and time distinct from our own, tempting those caught in the compulsion of favoring only a preferred label to look elsewhere.
With its undeniable urban bohemian verve, it teaches the perfect balance of wet and dry storage, revealing mature yet still vibrant aromas woven into a humid structure, neither weary nor depleted by the damp condensation of some Taiwanese basement.
Through earthy undertones interwoven with hints of leather seats from an old E-Class and cognac-soaked cork, it conjures a muggy, far-from-perfect night inside a car, where buildings seem to jostle against each other to stay upright. What emerges is a metropolitan Erebus seen through the hyperreal cornea of Richard Estes, with the visual cortex overexposed to those nocturnal images of smoke and decay, a flickering interplay of light and shadow in the neo-noir outskirts of Hong Kong.
The leaves evoke the metallic sheen of a puddle on warm asphalt, the dry sweetness of tobacco, a distant echo of spices and herbal tinctures. They also bring to mind fermented fruit, aged pomelo peels, the scent of old haberdashery furniture, and the leather-bound books of a forgotten bookstore hidden in the alleys of a city that never sleeps.
The sip feels like a 35mm frame, with each scent of time etched into it, like a latent image forming on film, one catches a glimpse of a past spent in some chipped underground warehouse, as well as a more recent existence in a better-exposed shop in Guangdong, when notes of chestnut, dried plum, figs, and kombucha come alive, only to give way to a faint yet persistent huigan, dissolving slowly and gradually like the last cigarette left burning, like the night retreating at dawn.
I’ve always loved investigative journalism but I’ve always hated those catastrophic clickbait headlines that always seem to make things bigger than they really are, but there’s a phenomenon in the pu’er world that’s been going on for a little too long to be simply buried like a dog with its bone.
Now, we all, or almost all, remember the bursting of the speculative bubble in 2007, where the pu’er market swelled exponentially overnight that spring only to falter in July and collapse over 70% by the end of the year, basically cutting the legs off an entire industry. Well, we may not be at those levels, but it doesn’t seem like the lesson has been learned, rather it seems like someone just put their shirt on inside out to hide the stain.
What were the causes? Well, to simplify, let’s consider that 70% of purchases were motivated by investment and not by real consumption, production quintupled in 4 years, saturating the market, to which we add fraudulent practices of counterfeiting, manipulation of markets and auctions and crisis of confidence in the product, the source and the quality due to opaque practices dictated by the absence of clear regulation that was convenient for everyone, then we obtain what is a self-destructive economic logic based on artificial growth, completely disconnected from the fundamentals of the product.
In the West we most likely think that Pu’er buyers have broken free from this dimension because we see a large part of them consuming the same tea they bought, which is partly true, but partly not. Many areas of Yunnan that have reached rationally unthinkable numbers, brands or editions that beat crazy prices have behind them a generative structure often of speculative nature that does not always have to do with scarcity, production costs or the quality of the tea.
A while back I found myself tasting old samples or cakes from my collection that I had probably forgotten about. I tasted an old 2005 DaYi 7542, batch 501, along with some more recent production, a 2022 7542 and a 2022 Premium Peacock, both batch 01. I honestly can’t say they were bad teas, they were really good, but to what extent can you justify a crazy price, crazy especially when compared to those before 2015, for a basically “a little more than good” tea. This is not only true for DaYi, but let’s analyze for a moment the price trend of some famous productions. Among the most sought-after cakes in recent years there has been the 2003 Jin No.5 batch 201, in January 2021 its value was 1.45 million RMB/jiàn (84 cakes) while in January 2025 the value amounts to 1.1 million, lower than 5 years ago and above all far from the exorbitant price of 3.2 million in March 2021, same fate for the 2005 7542 (batch 501) which in February 2020 was 230.000 RMB /jiàn (84 cakes), reached 880.000 in February 2021 and then collapsed again at the beginning of this year to 300.000 RMB.
In recent years DaYi has marketed numerous other special and prestigious productions, such as the 2201 Premium Peacock or the 2021 Golden Rhyme to counteract the erosion of the pu’er market prices, but without much success, the first had a value of 118.000 RMB / 42 cakes now collapsed to 61.500 RMB while the second which had reached 152.000 RMB / 28 cakes now touches “only” 33.000 RMB.
So, in China there is a particular and complex economic situation and due to personal and corporate financial difficulties, those who invested in this type of goods have tried to divest from illiquid assets such as Pu’er. The tea market does not guarantee a quick sale (and this can be seen from the huge amount of cakes kept obsessively by those who bought them for this purpose) without even seeing a potential for short-term revaluation, and this has led to a greater supply than demand, which is why many recently produced cakes are and will be available in the future.
Added to this is the real estate crisis triggered by the collapse of Evergrande in 2021, the real estate sector has traditionally absorbed a huge share of savings from Chinese families, who now see the value of their properties deflate, which has caused an erosion of perceived wealth. The liquidation, even at a loss, of pu’er tea to quickly recover liquidity and move a part of immovable money can only worsen the price situation.
Let’s add a piece: in recent years some brands, attracted by demand, have pushed for an increase in production, not limiting themselves to a couple of pressing batches; with the drop in demand, the market is now flooded with a surplus of product and an inability of the market to absorb the supply.
But above all, wage stagnation, a lack of robust welfare for which the capital of families is concentrated more on pension, salary and educational expenses and a slowdown in redistributive policies slow down or cancel the entry of new buyers into the market, a situation that brings us back to the last problem of the analysis: The collapse of the speculative segment.
The cakes of large “investment” brands have suffered a 30-50% drop compared to the 2021-2022 peaks, especially for the post-2010 editions, a sign of the exhaustion of the speculative model, something already seen in 2007, but currently the situation is less dramatic. However, reliance on time is not a reassuring factor in the development of these phenomena, which can see prolonged stagnation as well as a sudden acceleration rather than their dissolution.
Now I get to the point. For years, the “investment” market has functioned with a pseudo-pyramidal scheme: investors bought new and old editions waiting for others to enter after them, driving up prices. When the absence of new players becomes apparent, the system simply collapses, as the first to arrive only gain if new buyers arrive willing to pay higher prices (those who know the world of fine wines are probably not unfamiliar with this game). So prices collapse because there is no longer real demand to support them.
The biggest problem with the collapse of speculative Pu’er is that as it increases in value it sometimes cause the price increase of raw material and “consumer” cakes even from small brands, it can have exactly the opposite impact on the local economy of the region, where many small producers depend on the sector, since the costs for harvesting, processing and storage of Pu’er increase accordingly, especially for the latter who do not benefit from economies of scale.
In addition, many young people seem to give up on this type of purchase and the crisis of confidence due to several allegedly rigged auctions have not helped the image of this sector which in itself is already a niche.
In this article, not all the main problems have been touched upon, for example, I have intentionally left out the problem of fakes (both new and old pu’er, both big brands and, especially currently, smaller brands) and that of fraud on the origin of the leaves, which represents a huge critical point.
As far as pu’er consumers are concerned, the only possible logic is to form and create a personal standard that is totally independent from the logic of price, fashion and advertising of brands and sellers. If it is true that a low price does not bode well, it is also true that a high price does not provide any a priori guarantee on its real quality or on the truthfulness of its origin, and this applies to both Asian retailers and European sellers. Trust in a shop and in the people who run it still remains a fundamental prerequisite, as well as fighting speculative logic through greater criticism and greater detachment from trends that contribute nothing to an authoritative and well-founded personal education, nor do any good to a market that certainly no longer needs speculative logic (also considering the polarity of speculation, which could occur in a unipolar way in the West thanks to some retailers without it actually occurring in Asia). All very familiar advice to those of you who have been out here a while, nothing new from the early 2000s.
To conclude, this trend of continuous increase in prices in a generalized way is not infinitely sustainable, and history unfortunately teaches this, especially in an uncertain global economic context. The future of the market will depend on the ability to balance price, quality and accessibility, avoiding speculative excesses and opening up to new consumers. If the sector is able to adapt, Pu’er will remain a valuable product, but with more balanced and less volatile prices. Companies must become ambassadors of transparency, for example by introducing blockchain certifications or declaring costs and margins so as to show how much is paid to farmers, as happens with some micro-roasteries in the coffee world. Consumers must act as ethical “gatekeepers” avoiding being carried away by the hype without evaluating the quality and institutions must guarantee clear, more stringent rules that absurdly no one seems to ask for (except to limit the use of fertilizers or other superficial environmental restrictions), clarify terms (e.g. gushu) so that they are internationally univocal and measurable as happens with European standards and denominations. All these things seem like utopia, but every now and then it’s good to say things out loud, they don’t even sound bad.
*All prices in the article were taken from donghetea.com
For generations, caravans laden with pu’er have traversed the steep paths of Lunan, eluding the harsh karst landscape, leaving it behind them, slowly advancing towards Tibet.
The muleteers, with their faces hollowed by frost and fatigue, relied on themselves, on their companions, on the tenacity of their horses, following the paths traced by their ancestors, where every bend concealed stories of exchange, trade and survival.
Pasha seems to have been able to overcome everything, from the destruction that occurred with the Panthay rebellion to the wreck of traditionalism and the collectivization of the Cultural Revolution, to the persecution of the Red Guards.
Hölderlin wrote “where there is danger, what saves also grows,” and so it is here that natural beauty and spiritual aspirations intertwine into a rich and vibrant cultural cloth, and teas like this, with their dense depth of flavors of vanilla, candied fruit, nuts and persimmons, take us into a dimension of time that we cannot easily grasp, a place where tradition is not only preserved, but continually recreated.
With its silky sip, honeyed sweetness, musky and citrus tones, the cup becomes a sort of refuge, a bridge rather than an end.
When we sip a cup of pu’er like this we are entering into a dialogue with the past, it reminds us that not all is lost, that in its slow and patient aging lies both a concession and a resistance to time.
A great pu’er becomes an elegy, not only a lyric of sadness for what is lost but a celebration of the intrinsic value of what has been. In its leaves pervaded by scents of red dates, walnuts and toasted pumpkin seeds, of withered broom flowers, its elegiac essence revived through a call to the earth, to history, to the culture, every sip becomes an existential plan, a way of inhabiting time with consciousness.
It offers us a key to a further, more saturated dimension of time, in which loss is not an obstacle to overcome but nourishment for our being. Both, the elegy and the pu’er make memory a cure, an antidote to oblivion, reminding us that the past is not a wound to be closed, but a legacy to draw from.
Wild Harvested 