How We Source Our Teas
Question: How do we choose our teas?
Answer: With love.
Teas and tea wares are selected by the Wan Ling Tea House Team. Although we are a small business, we are lucky to be supported by an extended network of friends which we are proud to call the Wan Ling Tea House Team. Fortunately for us many of our friends share our passion for great tea and beautiful tea wares. We hope this means that you get the choicest products as direct as possible with the convenience, security and service of buying from an European company.
Provenance is critical to us and we spend as much time travelling as possible. Our base in China means we are in touch with the general market and the local producers throughout the year. Tea travels are not only limited to harvest time. For us it is vital that we are in touch with the producers as well as being on the ground, developing our knowledge and understanding of the tea growing processes.
An example of our team in action at direct sourcing is Wan Ling and her sister. Wan Ling's sister runs her own tea shop in FuJian, so you can truly say it is a family affair. Between them they travel to the tea mountains in AnXi to personally select the spring and autumn Tie Guan Yin. FuJian is also the source of our WuYi Rock Oolong teas and our Jasmine Teas.
Wan Ling's old friend Huang Mei (a native of AnHui and who has her own tea shop in AnHui) travels to HuangShan, SheXian, QiMen (Keemun), TaiPing and LuAn to hand select our green teas.
For our PuEr's and Dian Hong black tea we travel as often as possible to Yunnan to source our teas as well as develop our network of farmers, tea aficionados and tea hunters. Our old friends in YunNan keep us a breast of the complex tea market and the ebbs and flows in the constantly developing tea world there.
With our porcelain tea wares, we are very lucky that one of our oldest and closest friends in Shanghai, Xiao Ying, is a native of JingDeZhen. He along with his business partner run a successful antiques shop in ShangHai as well as helping us work with JiangXi artists to find stunning porcelain tea wares.
James's lifelong love and fascination with ceramics has come from growing up with Ian Gregory (Tom, our web designers father). Ian lives in Dorset in the UK where James and Tom grew up. We are proud to now be stocking a limited edition of GongFu tea cups by Ian Gregory.
Other products these have been discovered on our tea travels or have been requested by our customers.
All of our YiXing, ZiSha tea pots are sourced direct. Wan Ling Tea House is very lucky as YiXing is a short bus ride from Shanghai allowing us to regularly visit, developing lasting connections with artists and discovering new artists at the same time.We hope you like our collection.
If you have any questions about the Wan Ling Tea House range, provenance, regional information or would like to request a product please get in touch.
