Fenghuang Shan 鳳凰山

Fenghuang Shan rises above Chaozhou in the east of Guangdong, and it is one of the few places in China outside Yunnan where the age of the trees, gushu 古樹 (ancient trees), is what sets price and reputation. A survey in the early 1980s counted more than 3,700 tea trees over 200 years old across the range. The number has fallen since the 1990s, but several thousand still stand, most of them between 200 and 400 years, and the oldest on record grew on Wudong Shan at around 1,150 meters and was reckoned at close to 700. The written history runs back further than the surviving trees. A Chaozhou prefecture chronicle of 1547 already names a Fengshan tea sent as tribute, and the story told locally is older still: the last child emperor of the Song, retreating south in 1279, revived with leaves gathered from the mountainside. The songzhong 宋種 cultivar takes its name from that account.

Everything grown here descends from one seed-grown population, fenghuang shui xian 鳳凰水仙, which is registered in its own right as a national variety, 華茶17號. It is a different plant from the Fujian shui xian 福建水仙 grown in Wuyi, 華茶9號, a triploid multiplied only from cuttings, while the Fenghuang population is a diploid that has always been grown from seed. Its oldest local name is hongyin 紅茵: some accounts treat hongyin as the original population that shui xian was selected from, others as simply an earlier name for it. Because it reproduces from seed, no two trees come out quite alike, and over centuries growers picked out individual bushes whose aroma stood apart and propagated those by cutting. That is what dancong 單叢 means at its root: one bush, picked and made on its own. Under the old state purchasing system it was also a grade, the top of three, above shui xian and langcai 浪菜. What the market sells as Phoenix dancong today is usually a named aroma line cut from one mother bush rather than one tree.

Wudong Shan reaches 1,391 meters and is not even the highest peak here, Fengniao Ji is, at nearly 1,500, but it holds the highest tea village in the range, and mist, cool nights and slow growth come with that elevation. What the Chinese market pays for, though, is Wudong's history: the oldest named mother bushes, and the families who have kept them, are there. Prices follow accordingly, and the rest of the range, which shares much of the same climate, stays lesser known.

We source in both. On Wudong we work with old seed-grown shui xian trees at the core of the mountain, never cut back for propagation and left instead to root deeper. Most of them are gushu, over three hundred years old, and we tested them clean of 556 pesticides. We mostly order them processed traditionally as green tea, close to a sheng, and we taste before and after the bake so the roast follows our requirements. Outside it we came to know a farmer named Yong, who about twenty-five years ago went looking for ground in Fenghuang that was still clean of pesticides and still held the Wudong climate, found it at Baishuica at almost 1,000 meters, and bought it. He grows other cultivars and other trees among the tea, so the garden holds an ecosystem rather than a crop. Weeds are cut two or three times a year and left where they fall, the only fertilizer the bushes get. The bushes are never trimmed, and mountain water runs down the slope so the soil stays damp without irrigation. When we walked it, the ground was alive with worms and insects. We tested our own samples on our 556-pesticide lab panel and they came back completely clean as well. The management is yefang 野放 in the literal sense, minimum human interference on ground that has never known pesticides or chemical fertilizers. Every year Yong lets us taste the new cultivars coming out of the garden and choose what fits our collection.

Fenghuang holds more named cultivars than anyone can drink through, and the pull, as in Wuyi Shan, is to try them all. Genetics set a potential for aroma and character, but that potential is not met in every season, and in our opinion, variety on its own is not a reason to list a tea. Exceptional performance that meets its potential is. Our work is to source, taste and grade, and in dancong, in yancha and in sheng we find only several batches a season worth stocking. Learning to leave out the merely good, the ones we once listed for the sake of range, is part of maturing as tea professionals: we can name the flaws, recognize the batches that will perform even after resting and aging, and hold the selection tight. Every year we learn again how 'less is more'.

Chaozhou is also where gongfu cha 工夫茶 is a daily habit rather than a ceremony, and dancong is what fills the gaiwan 蓋碗 or the hand-thrown Chaozhou zhuni pot 手拉朱泥壺. Fenghuang town was named a hometown of Chinese famous tea in 2008, and dancong processing sits inside the 2022 UNESCO listing of China's traditional tea processing techniques. Abroad, in our experience, Phoenix dancong is read mostly through its aromatics, which is a narrow way into a range holding this many old trees. We have made Chaozhou a focus of our own study since moving to Xiamen, three hours away from home, and we go back four to five times a year to keep learning from the mentors we work with there, in the gardens, in teaware and in the way they host. What we learn goes into our online courses and into our yearly Min Yue East China tour, where travelers meet those mentors first-hand.