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Yunnan Tea Facts

Located in the South West mountainous corner of China, Yunnan is blessed with some of the most beautiful countryside. It is home to a large number of ethnic minorities making for an extremely colourful province.

Much of the tea traditionally produced was grown in the wild, however with the growing interest and popularity of Yunnan's Pu Er tea's this is no longer the case. It also considered that older, more mature trees provide considerably better qualities for the preparation of Pu Er's, interestingly this is the opposite to most green & Oolong teas. The reasoning behind this is related to a tea's 'qi' or energy. Wild trees leaves have a considerably more complex range of often very subtle flavours that are 'absorbed' from the surrounding area. This include other plants & flowers, the soil, moulds & fungi. The older the tree, the greater its 'experiences', so in turn the energy held within is greater and of a greater intensity, aspects of these characters are passed on to the leaf & bud.

The tea trees of Yunnan are considered by many botanists to be the original source of the tea plant as it is likely that due to the altitude of Plateaus in Yunnan region avoided the ice ages that came after the Tertiary period in the worlds ancient history. From here the original plants may have been distributed through South Eastern Asia via the great rivers such as the Mekong, Irrawaddy and the Yangzi that flow down from the Himalayas (Xi Ma La Ya Shan).

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