Back in 2017 we came across a very nice Yan Cha from one Wuyi tea supplier. It was quite expensive and difficult to sell but we found it as very interesting product to our overall tea shop portfolio despite the origin of this tea is being from different province ( we are not restricting our selves to only Yunnan tea , as the name of the shop might suggest ) .
Unfortunately two years later, the supplier just suddenly changed prices ( or as she claimed , not doing daily drinkers anymore but only high quality ) to something completely out of the our range ( western market range ) . All she offered was 3-5x marked up that we got before.
I do personally started to like Yan Cha and with any occasions having a tea with Fujian people, I’d ask for Da Hong Pao and such. So there it is, decision was made, we are going there to check what is going on. Hoping to find new sources , new tastes , new stories and mainly, the actual knowledge of what is all that fuss about.
Unfortunately there is not ( wasn’t back then ) direct flight from Kunming to Wuyishan ( in fact Wuyishan airport was closed for public flights at that time altogether ). We have to transfer via Xiamen. Taking a high speed train from there , we arriving to Wuyishan train station and to my surprise , not seeing many advertisements for Yan Cha ( like we have in about Puerh tea in Kunming ) but more about Fuding Bai Cha. We are picking up the car from car rental and driving to the hotel to drop the bags first. Our hotel is on south side of Wuyi Shan which is touristic, but we are not planning to waste time in tourist tea shops much anyway.
It is one long road from north to south and from the part where the actual national park area starts ( north gate to scenic area ) , the tea shops are lined up next to each other. We skip visiting those front-line touristic shops and aiming to the part of the town where the wholesale business are located mostly. Wuyishan doesn’t have any unified wholesale tea market , the tea suppliers / “producers ” ( will explain quotation marks later ) are scattered all over the place, and in some locations they are more concentrated.
Driving through the area of multi floor villas with signs of “something something cha chang ” – means tea factory ) makes me already not feeling good about it. The wealth visible on front must to be reflected in prices of the products ( unless there is another business which covers those expenses ). Walking into the one of the ” tea factory ” villa. On the ground floor reception is a big tea table with bored workers swiping their Tik Tok and not even bothering to say hello when we enter. Passing trough the corridor where on of the walls are hanging certificates, wining awards, diplomas and trophies sitting on the narrow wooden shelves. As I assumed, and was confirmed later with other local people, those can be made on special order ( not real ones ) or being from the non significant competitions which just those producers do between them selves without having any legit grounds for the quality approval.
We are sited in tasting room and some young guy ,who supposed to be the manager of the company, brewing tea for us with a lots of questions about our business. Firstly asking what price range we are interested in , so he can be more efficient with sampling. Makes sense to ask this way , yet we have have no any particular price in mind and obviously answering that might lead to the speculation from selling side , so just telling him which number per jin ( 500g ) is a non-sense for us. He is brewing some Rou Gui and Shui Xian which we hardly can distinguish difference as the overwhelming roast just covers all up. All that influenced by fact that there is 5C outside, probably 10C inside shop where is no heater and Buddha knows what water he is using to brew the tea.

The tea is poured into the porcelain cups with porcelain tea spoons. By smelling the back of the tea spoon, one should be able to appreciate the aroma and supposedly being able to judge quality of the processing. And here comes the issue, with which we were struggling through all our Wuyishan tea tasting journey. They were all nice, fruity , flowery, candy like sweet fragrant , yet, probably 10% of this was actually reflected also in the taste of tea. The taste of tea was bitter, astringent and dry sensation ( inner skin of banana / persimmon fruit like ) on the tongue or in full mouth. All that covered with overwhelming charcoal roast taste. I’m noisy sipping it in , as suggested , to get more air with it , slurping , “bubbling” it in a mouth and whatever else can do to get some / anything interesting from the liquid. Something what my brain would recognize ( not necessarily sweet , but just anything interesting ) and justify the price asked . We also asking to get A-B compare of the same tea but different price range , to understand what is the value here. They don’t have ( and so any other factory or tea shop had similar issue ) same stuff. It is always not fair comparison as one could differ from another by level of the roast, different time of the production and mostly even different varietal. Usually the more expensive would be less roasted and more-likely Shu Xian , where you could feel some nice sweetness and flowery notes , the cheaper one would be more roasted Rou Gui , more aromatic from the back of the spoon but hell bitter taste in cup. In all week trying dozens suppliers , no one could provide a fair comparing A/B test of similar varietal, same roast level but different price tag. Not sure if it’s intentional ( not letting people get more educated about the quality ) or it is just the way it is. As some articles dedicated to Wuyi tea might suggest, the higher quality tea is usually roasted darker, we have experienced it actually other way around. In fact, it would make more sense, as it would apply to other tea ( the roast , same as fermentation in puerh , can cover some flaws ). I blame the weather. It’s just too cold. Some shops have even opened doors , no heat, so can have 8C inside. We sit with winter clothes and hats on. Almost feel like even put some gloves as small cup not enough to heat up your fingers.



Later we learning that many so called tea factories are basically the companies who buy very light roasted ( just basic minimum roast to stabilize the tea from further withering degradation ) called “half product” and do the additional “tan bei” – roast – them selves, which adds / supposed to add , the market value. Similar concept we run into, was in Lincang , where producer offered very light processed Hong Cha ( was like a shai hong but much more rough in taste ) and customer ( the wholesale buyer / shop owner ) could choose the level of roast.
We already starting to see few downsides. First – not everybody is the real master of the roasting technique which requires to understand the nature of the tea leaves ( like moisture content , character of varietal etc. ). It does require lots of try and fail, in order to get some experience. For example, we met a guy who lost his job in Beijing so decided to come back to Wuyi and join the hype. Few years ago, he invested his saved money into the equipment and rebuilding his house to kind of pseudo tea factory. The output , as expected, was very bad. Two years of experience is just not enough, and he probably doesn’t know how long journey is in front of him, as he seemed to be surprised that we didn’t like his work. Please do not misunderstand , I’m not criticizing it. I guess, I’d do the same in his position. Just pointing out the details about Wuyi Shan tea business background we saw / learned. Some even do different business, like real estate and such , and just diverse part of their investments into this “game” ( similar to the puerh business in Yunnan ). Usual marketing “We are the tea farmers / tea factory with our plantations / trees and such” , showing us a pictures of them selves with tea plantations or trees , how they process the tea in their factory etc. ( similar to vendors on Kunming market ).
Secondly – the amounts are just not there. Those so called tea factories might be working like with 100 – 500kg of the tea per season, relaying on that to cover their expenses and also make some money on top. This might work with some Gushu material , which is demanded and has it’s own justifiable qualities and as puerh ( long term storage ) makes a feasible investment. But not tai di cha which you can throw away in 3 years time , or so. They will tell you how the high price is because workers costs ( not that actually high as they tell you, we double checked it ) , complex processing ( yes, it’s more complex than puerh , but they do use machines mostly to do so ) . All those handmade ” yao qing “is a show mostly used for Tik Tok or other video advertisement ( as we also learned from one older actual owner of the local tea factory which we visit on their tea plantations ) .






There are not many , as we also learned , vendors and those “semi-producers ” who would dare to take in storage big amounts of tea , not because the initial investment but because it’s not long lasting tea, like puerh for example. Generally, after the roast , if well packed ( air tight ) the sort of claimed expiration date is 3 years. Of course there are the cases longer than that , the tea might develop some interesting taste. The roast will mellow out for sure, but then the question is , if anything valuable would emerge out as well ( and that requires to be anything valuable in there at the first place ). Other factor is, that suppliers / producers can’t keep the loose leaf in small pouches, because the wholesale buyer ( tea shop ) would require a custom packaging . So they have to keep the mao cha in big 15kg boxes , which are not airtight and therefore vulnerable to the outer environment. Firstly oxidation and mostly ( the worse part ) is the heat and humidity in summer. Therefore they have to re-roast it in some periods , in which case the tea is loosing it’s fragrance, water and original taste being replaced with burned leaf notes ( roast taste ).

Some producers keep their mao cha in plastic bags inside of big aluminum jars with fairly tight lid closed. That probably helps a bit , yet the storage efficiency ( as you can see ) is not as good as squared boxes piled on top of each other. Let alone this picture is taken in shop in touristic area ,so the rent is not cheap. Others are trying to preserve the tea leaves by humidifier running 24/7 ( picture on the right ) , which is energy costly and hard to say how effective, as they also re-roast the tea. This one is from tea factory outside of the town.


The other factor which makes this tea expensive is the tourism. You can google , or probably use some AI tools, to inquire annual tourist flow in Wuyi Shan in order to understand the nature of the local tea business opportunities. It doesn’t matter how long the history of the tea production is there, it had turned into the tourist souvenir product , no matter what any of local vendors / producers will try to claim. That’s what we saw and I will stick to this claim until I see any change.
It is a beautiful place to visit after all. If you are a tea lover , like us, you would get stunned by the tea gardens located between the rocks . Unfortunately , you can only dream about to get the tea from those ( will get to that later ) .






As you can expect, the tea from this area is overpriced and doesn’t have to correspond to actual quality. This is just a location status ( similar to Laobanzhang or Bingdao in Yunnan ). But the fact is , that The real Yan Cha ” cliff tea ” comes from this area, where the surrounding rocks ( mountains ) influence the soil , therefore the tea plant it self. Yet, not everything is hunky-dory as it sounds ( I’ll explain later ) .
We spend a day in this park and as the true Yan Cha lover , the place I must visit, is Da Hong Pao.




Please note that these pictures are from the end of December , so low tourist season. We still got across some noisy tourist groups but there were some moments of peacefulness and tranquility. Walking on the comfortably paved paths around very much looked after tea bushes, was an ineradicable experience ( compared to our rural Yunnan ). There is also a tourist gift shop across this site where you can buy and brew the tea ( sorry I didn’t bother to photograph that one ). We bought a small souvenir ( box with 2 pouches of da hong pao , of course not made from this garden. ). This is the One and Only Da Hong Pao tea garden, from which the tea is not available to us, mortals. ( not even mention the “Mu Shu” the mother tree on the mountain slope – 6g / 5 000 000 CNY and it’s reserved only for gov. high ranking officials. …as we were told in that shop at least ).
Now, this is pretty much the scenery you get from most of the blogs and videos promoting Wuyi tea. Vlogers who sit between the bushes, brewing the tea with excitement of being at the origin and want to share it with everyone ( mostly trying to sell you some tea ) . Everything is beautiful romantic, art of tea and such. Those who read our blog , already know that we are not that case 😉 So here comes some reality:
If you are an enthusiastic Wuyi tea drinker , you already know that the tea pricing / market value there, is classified not only by varietals ( tons of those. ) , trees and processing, but also by location.
- “Zheng Yan” 正岩 – which comes from the mentioned park / scenic area with rocks.
- “Ban Yan” 半岩 – literally “half rock” , and this applies to tea trees located outside the park , yet in some , unclear for us, distance from there. Presumably trees surrounding the park from outside.
- “Wai Shan” 外山 – outside mountain. That can include anything in Wuyi Shan area but also some might use completely different area tea ( will talk about it later ) .
There is a more selected and detailed specification of the origin based / specific location like before river , after river, in or out of the valley etc. This is just very simplified version of what locals generally use when selling the tea ( unless you ask for more specifics, which might exactly lead to the point that they are going to sell you what is not as they claim it is, because it becomes more obvious that you are focused on the tea ID , to justify your investment , more than actual taste = price ).
And as you are guessing right, that’s where all dirt is starts from.
Of course , this is a quite similar concept to the pu erh tea with exception of the fact that famous villages like Laobanzhang have a security checking at the entrance to make sure that no outside tea is imported to the village so only the authentic one is sold there. Wuyishan has no such a restriction ( means shops inside the park can literally sell anything ) as the processing of tea leaves is done outside anyway. From that stage , you can’t be even sure if you buy tea in shop located in the area , you are buying Zheng Yan at all. As the tea in Wuyi is expensive, for most of the tourists probably non-understandable taste as well , the concept of Tea Location is the one of the most used marketing tool. You can’t expect that general tourist will get his head around the charcoal taste liquid with aromatic porcelain tea spoon to pay hefty price tag unless good story and beautiful packaging , which is the second but not less important factor of selling the Wuyi tea.



Should you be puzzled with the charcoal bitter and dry taste , most of the shops will tell you that this “tan bei” – roast – taste will diminish within a year and so the other ugly taste you experiencing now. So we asked for year old version ” ge nian ” – last year – of the same tea. Of course, as mentioned before , they don’t have same varietal, same trees and same level of the roast from last year in order to prove what they claim. So we always ending up comparing with some other tea ( different varietal, different roast level ) which doesn’t reflect the fact they claim. However, old year Yan Cha does have some roast diminished, but question is how good is going to be another year or two later , if not sold?
We tried in order places their “ge nian” tea , and still the level of roast ( claimed to be medium ) was mostly covering up anything what possibly the leaf could offer. We do not claim to be an experienced Yan Cha drinkers but we are not beginners also. I fail to believe that all tea here is like that and continuing to search.
There is no point looking for real Zheng Yan.
The right price for the Zheng Yan will still not guarantee you getting the real one. Sourcing from the vendor who is trusted / recommended by tea drinkers who do not posses the ability / experience to distinguish the real Zheng Yan from the others, is not an option either. Those people just vouch the for the shop because had good tea from them ( which is good but doesn’t help much with mentioned issue ). Being able to distinguish the Zheng Yan from Ban Yan takes lots of time and tea to drink. Although we have been there only a week, not wasting our time in some tourist oriented tea shops but actively driving all around the mountains and producers ( including some famous ones ). We had a chance to try only two Zheng Yan pieces, and for sure, I wouldn’t be able to spot it if was given to me as single session without anything to compare same time. It’s more difficult than to learn areas by taste of puerh tea, as the Yan Cha tea leaves are more processed, the level of the roast might and will vary from batch to batch. Means it is very difficult and time consuming to get some dense taste map in your brain / memory. If you are lucky enough and each year can get hands on some Zheng Yan , it might be each year so different so you will find hard to hang on something which would disguise it’s real origin. Honest vendors there ( there are some, don’t worry 😉 will tell you that after 10y in business they kinda are able to distinguish Zheng Yan from Ban Yan if the roast is more or less same level ( and even that is not always 100% shot ) .
What I’m trying to suggest here is, that with this particular tea , is better to concentrate on your very own taste=price map. Compare with what you had from different shops and choose based on that. This is not same as pu erh, where you might not appreciate the taste of the new tea, as it has potential to develop with aging later, which you might not be able to see yet. Wuyi tea has some taste transformation within its own limits, but if it’s not appealing to you from beginning, it’s not gonna be better later.
Other case, which is kind of similar to our Yunnan Bing Dao village for example, also in Wuyishan the tea trees are being planted inside the park just for sake of the ID ( location price tag ) . And the worse than that is , because the actual soil in some areas is not only beneficial to the tea trees. ( as the ones which are close to the rocks ) but also lacking of the necessary nutrition to support the grow.






So the locals have to not only bring some nutrition and mineral rich soil ( red soil ) to cover the deficit but also apply lots of chemicals. Those bags are everywhere. They didn’t even bothered to clean it up and some trees even have a QR code, in case you are interested in purchase 😉 This picture is taken at the north gate, I guess the bags are still there 😉 And as you can see , it is pretty far from the mountain, yet the price tag is quite high ( because mentioned location ) .
Yes, in Yunnan also chemicals are used on some large scale produced tai di cha (bushes) , but the tea doesn’t cost arms and legs like this one though.
We were very upset to learn that the tea with such a high price tag , producer doesn’t even have a decency to do it organic way. But as we learned later, that apart of the soil problems , the low elevation also brings some buggy issues, so it is difficult to keep some efficient harvest ratio without chemicals.
The fact is , that in the Wuyi area there are around 30 000 tea business, and even despite mentioned little amount they usually take in storage, still the demand is higher than what what actual rock area can offer. And here we are getting into the concept of sourcing from other places ( means even out of Wuyi area ) . Also on internet you can find Yan Cha for various prices and some don’t correspond to the Wuyi prices at all. Yes, there are other mountains ( quite far from Wuyishan ) which also have Rou Gui , Shui Xian and so on. Less expensive and the taste might be even better. In fairness, in many cases we tried, the good Wai Shan is better than average Ban Yan , and of course cheaper.

From the business point of view ( probably rather useful info for the tea vendors ) . The wholesale concept in Wuyishan is bit different from Yunnan. There is none 😉 There is kind of concept but when you spend a bit time there and start to understand the quality:taste ratio , you will find out that you would have to invest lots of money and long time cooperation with some particular producers to get a business doable deal. The wholesale shops offering very tiny discount from actual expensive retail price ( price difference per jin – 500g ) if buying full 15kg box, which might more-likely just to cover your loses from broken bits at the bottom of the box ( the dust you can’t sell ). And exactly because they don’t have the efficient amount of tea to sell it in bulks.
To cover that issue, some tea factories came up with “solution”. They basically have ridiculously overpriced products ( retail prices ) and offering you some “very interesting ” wholesale discount if you purchase for certain ( usually big ) amount at once.
But if you get some taste map in your head already, you will find out that after that awesome discount you are just getting ripped off less than retail buyer ( means getting the true retail market price , not the wholesale one ). We have spend almost an afternoon in one semi-big tea producer. We drunk through the various products they have and the owner was changing the tea after every 3rd steep. I asked to continue with some of them further in order to find out the actual quality. Then she took us for an excursion through their factory, showing their magnificent storage, asked me to take some of their products in hands and pose with them ( basically doing an advertisement ) for a photo . Ok, I’m not gonna complain about it much as she gave us some tea samples after. But whole point is that we haven’t been accepted as serious business visitor but just like , ” hey another foreigner here, lets use it “. And we came seriously for business , not for “monkey show” …that’s a sort of official name for jobs where foreigners are used for display as part of the promotion. The funny part was that she started with 100k ( CNY ) purchase minimum to enter their wholesale door, with each floor we were walking trough , she would knock off couple of “wans” ( wan = 10k in Chinese ) . So till we reached the end of excursion , the figure was 50k 😉 Let’s be honest, I wouldn’t invest even 10k in such a tea especially if the discount was still rip off.

I understand that it takes lots of expenses to run the show and having only few hundred kilos in storage ( apparently some for aging ) which are not selling as they wish it would, is even harder. I’m afraid the feasibility it’s just not there. It is not a pu erh, which can age and gain on value, it’s not a Gushu, which can claim the price to it’s long brewing qualities ( apart of other ones of course ). The tea they store , in good case, last good 8 steps ( the very expensive one ) , but in general we tried ( yet still expensive ) , after 4th was dead. Aging potential , in my opinion , from couple of years to non.
With this trip we actually didn’t expect to get some awesome deal or some exclusive supplier / producer. Although I was hoping to expand our sources. I was kind of psychologically prepared by one Fujian vendor that the prices for their bushes are like for Gushu in Yunnan, that’s why he is not doing Wuyi tea and selling puerh on our Kunming tea market 😉
As one tea friend of mine said : ” you know , We , Wuyi tea addicts , are kind of already got use to pay like 1$/g “. I understand that , yet, can’t help my self to ask a question : is it a really 1$ per gram of tea, gram of non feasibility, gram of hype or gram of greed? Of course that this tea has its specific market ( and so the business model ), offer – demand which is regulated by natural economy ( how much people are willing to spend ) and we are not in power to control that, so just can cope with it.

Typical example would be this tea plantation from which tea in past “no body” wanted. It was just out of the main stream interest and very cheap. Till president showed up and took some photos there 😉 Now there is a tea center across the road and tea price is ridiculous. Good for them and their economy , I wish them all success.
As we already mention in our blog about pu erh tea how speculative it is, with Wuyishan we feel the water is much deeper. I believe that our tea taste experience was influenced by cold weather ( I hope that the same tea tastes much better in 25C ) so we mostly took samples to try at home and decide after. I wish we could have some real gems to offer but the most of our clientele are generally drinkers with a regular folks budget and so we have to work with that. Even when drinking beautiful flowery Shui Xian , I still couldn’t convince myself to invest money for which I can buy something from fat trunks here in Yunnan , and get it age later without worrying about sell in time. We struggled and talked about it 3 days , trying to find some Pros of such an investment. The tea lover and enthusiast side was saying: buy , the business side of the brain said: do not even think about it. In fact , similar issue I had about this whole trip itself. We are not Fujian tea oriented shop and not even aiming to be one, but just the tea enthusiast side of brain won the argument back then, so we decided to invest money into the journey ( we also went to Anxi and Fenghuang Shan after ) .
