Ningde 寧德

Ningde is a prefecture-level city that sits on the northeastern coast of Fujian Province, and is also referred to as Mindong 閩東 ("east of Fujian"). While tea grows in all nine of its counties, today the industry gathers around two centers: white tea in Fuding, red tea in Fu'an. The white tea "boom" of the early 2000s turned an area that had spent a century making red tea into the capital of white tea. Larger production scales, detailed competition-level grading, and close government supervision followed, most notably the Fuding regulation and enforcement of picking windows. All these also contributed to Ningde becoming one of the most industrial tea landscapes in China.

Fuding white tea is usually dated to 1796, under the Qing dynasty, marked by the creation of baihao yinzhen 白毫銀針 (Silver Needle). In Fu'an, red tea production dates to 1851, when Tanyang gongfu 坦洋工夫 red tea was first made by a merchant named Hu Fusi 胡福四 from the local Tanyang caicha 坦洋菜茶. While gongfu red tea, and red tea in general, gained popularity in the West thanks to its durability in long-distance trading, white tea from Fuding kept its status as more premium, and arrived to Europe only in the 1890s. In 2022, both practices entered UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

What's common to both counties is the meeting of mountain and sea. Ningde has 878 kilometers of coastline and almost nothing flat behind it. In Fuding the land climbs from the shore to between 500 and 800 meters elevation, so gardens sit close enough to the sea to take its air while keeping the temperature swings of the hills. The climate is subtropical monsoon, averaging around 17.5 °C with more than 1,800 mm of rain, and three or four typhoons a year. Tea grows quickly and generously here, which is why the industry grew large and the pressure to pick never lets up.

The same climate works against the tea once it is made. Humid sea air, heavy rain and the typhoon season make this coast a poor place to age tea, unless it is kept in sealed, tightly controlled storage. The local slogan says otherwise: 一年茶、三年藥、七年寶, tea in the first year, medicine by the third, treasure by the seventh. It has been promoted hard, and it sold a great deal of white tea on the promise of age.

For a while much of that tea was pressed into cakes, borrowing the pu'er format, often with poor results, and the practice is fading as the trade learns that only some white teas, on some occasions, gain from pressing. We stopped pressing white tea in 2021, including our Yunnan white teas, and keep it for special occasions only; we have had better results and more control since. Taiwan, just across the strait, has even more volatile weather, and in our view, the idea of Taiwan storage as an ideal wet-storage climate for aging tea is one of the industry's biggest misconceptions.

Heavy fertilizer and pesticide use, as well as over-picking, are the real cost of the rise and fall of popularity of Fuding teas. We learned it the hard way. In 2019 we began testing samples from every grower we worked with against more than 556 registered pesticides, and our Fuding white tea, sold to us as organic, or "clean", failed badly, with some of the most pesticide-laden lab results we have seen to this day. We dropped it at once, and since similar pest-control practices were common across much of the area, we stopped sourcing from Fuding altogether for four years.

In the years that followed, the local government answered with strict rules: a full ban on chemical pesticides and herbicides in the gardens, enforced by trading bans and a traceability system that follows fresh leaf from garden to buyer. The rules were right, but they came fast, on land that had been sprayed for years, with little help for farmers to convert. When prices then fell sharply around 2024, farmers and anyone holding aged stock were hit hardest. Some villages around Fuding are still considered high-risk by many in the trade, and anything from them must be tested.

We returned in 2023, looking for one factor above all others: whether the tea is truly clean. Finding clean teas that also live up to Fuding's reputation was not an easy task, and it took us time to rebuild our network of relationships and trust with new farmers and producers. We spent thousands of dollars on lab tests, and met more than one source whose claims did not survive the lab, before we found the sources we trust. The problem is far from solved, since converting land takes time, and new areas we test still come back with poor results. Today we work closely with three great sources in Fuding and Fu'an, and each has passed the same lab tests and standards we set for every origin we source from, from Yunnan to Taiwan.

In Fuding we collaborate with Master Jia, our curator and long-time mentor, who is connected to makers that would otherwise be out of our reach. She chooses her farmers with close attention, reserves material for us ahead of the season, and sets the picking standard herself when needed. Through her we source the highest grade of Bai Mu Dan we have ever tried.

In Fu'an we work with the Chen family of Tanyang village. Master Chen is the only master we know in Tanyang who still makes its red tea the way it was made before the white tea boom. While most of his neighbors and colleagues replanted with Fuding Dabai 福鼎大白 and Fuding Dahao 福鼎大毫, the two main cultivars behind Fuding white tea, he kept bushes and old trees of the original heirloom Tanyang caicha (qun ti zhong 群體種). Master Chen still runs his final stages in small batches, so that sorting and firing get his full attention.