Yongde 永德

Yongde is a county in the Lincang prefecture of southwestern Yunnan, and one of our oldest sourcing origins. We first heard about Yongde in 2018, from a local English teacher on the bus to Fengqing, purely by chance. She was very proud of the relatively unknown tea from her county. Generally speaking, nobody pays attention to regions like Yongde until they get famous. Researching the area afterwards we came across Jenny, who soon became our curator there. What we tasted with her was enough to keep us coming back year after year.

What keeps us returning is the age and specificity of the gushu trees and the terrain they grow in, most trees are well over 100 years old, many over 300. The relatively stable temperature range during the day improves trees' growth. The high-altitude terrain, above 1,800 meters in most of the gardens we work with, makes the trees hard to reach, and the picking windows are short. Each spring we select specific trees, including danzhu 單株 (single-tree) selections, and decide together with Jenny whether a batch becomes sheng pu'er, white tea, or red tea. So far we work with more than twenty gushu gardens, only a few of them with any presence online outside China, and we keep exploring new micro-terroirs across this large county.

The ancient trees of Yongde rarely look their age. Usually, gushu 古樹 trees have a single, thick trunk; however, the trees here rise in several thinner trunks from a shared base, a shape we kept noticing as we climbed the mountains. During the Cultural Revolution, farmers in Yongde had to cut their tea trees back to the base, a practice called taiyi 台刈, to grow food crops, since their lesser-known tea could not provide for them, unlike the famous areas, whose trees were worth keeping. When tea regained its value decades later, the farmers allowed the old tea bases to regrow; meanwhile, the soil slowly rose around the buried original trunks, leaving only the thinner trunks visible above ground. Their age is simply harder to see, which keeps Yongde tea relatively good value for money. In a blind tasting, a good Yongde batch can easily be mistaken for a famous Lincang mountain at two or three times the price, and our wide range of tea styles and prices makes it a terroir for every level.

Unfortunately, it's all too common to see producers blending material from the lesser-known Yongde area with more famous terroirs that carry higher prices and demand but a similar profile, like Bingdao, labeling it simply "Bingdao" to raise their prices. We, however, believe in the unique character of Yongde, and choose to source Yongde teas under their own name. In China such blends are widely accepted as an affordable route to a famous name; to foreign buyers they can look like fake tea.

To do so, we rely on Jenny's experience in this area. She knows the mountains tree by tree, decides which gardens are worth sourcing from each year, and handles picking, processing, and tasting to her own highest standards. We have learned a great deal from watching how she estimates the overall health condition of each tree, and chooses the right danzhu to pick from, as well as the right day to pick. Many gardens here are not maintained at all, and a good share are not even picked, so they grow wild, which is what we note when we list each tea's agricultural practice.

The county sits relatively close to the Myanmar border, and the local culture is influenced by the Thai-speaking Dai 傣族 and Shan 撣族 peoples who live on both sides of the frontier. The tea industry here is dominated by women, who handle everything from plucking and processing to selling and running the business. While this isn't unusual throughout China, here in Yongde it's even more common, and we notice it every time we visit.

In fact, Jenny herself is the third generation of women tea sellers in her family, following in her grandmother's footsteps. When the COVID pandemic started, she decided to make her own tea to better control the quality, rather than relying on the garden owners who usually produce the tea here. During this period, when we could not travel to Yunnan, she kept sending samples of the annual harvests, so we could keep following how the terroir changed year by year. She even helped us explore unfamiliar places outside Yongde for our Blind Tasting Club, from mao er duo varieties to Taiwanese cultivars grown in Yunnan, set against their Taiwan counterparts. That remote journey kept us rooted in Yunnan while China was closed and we were sourcing in Southeast Asia. This is when our collaboration really took off: we started as her sole buyers, and we still work almost exclusively together. She is also our closest friend in Yunnan, and one of the most hardworking and talented tea makers we know in the province.