Editorial Conversation: Wuyi (武夷) Trip Report 2025

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A full transcript is included on the episode page and below:

[00:00:05] Jason Cohen: Hello everyone. I'm Jason Cohen, the author of an Introduction to the Art and Science of Chinese Tea Ceremony. Today we're doing a bonus episode on my Wuyi Revisited Trip 2025, Return to Wuyi. Here to join me for this conversation is the editorial team, Patrick Penny.

[00:00:23] Pat Penny: Hey, hey.

[00:00:24] Jason Cohen: And Zongjun Li.

[00:00:26] Zongjun Li: Hello. Hello.

[00:00:27] Jason Cohen: Pat, Zongjun, this was not one of the Tea Technique research trips. I was on a personal trip for a month in China, and I went to Wuyi and I wound up doing a bunch of tea things and I wrote about it.

[00:00:40] Pat Penny: Yeah, I remember talking to you and kind of joking that, that this was just gonna be your solo research trip, and you were like, no, no, uh, I'm only gonna do like one tea thing, you know. Na, Nancy will only like, let me get away with one tea thing. And lo and behold, like 20 plus pages of trip report later, you did like a ton of tea things, and this is like one of a few different areas you went to and did tea stuff. So this was like a huge solo tea trip. So really like just, what the heck? Why'd you do this without us?

[00:01:08] Jason Cohen: Well, 30 plus pages. Zongjun, you were invited to meet me in China. But

[00:01:13] Zongjun Li: I wasn't in China at the time, so good timing, man.

[00:01:17] Jason Cohen: But 30 plus pages. We went to Chengdu and we did a bunch of tea stuff there, went to Lushan and did a bunch of tea stuff there, Jingdezhen. But the one that really stuck out, the one that I wrote about, was Wuyi. And it was a very different experience this time.

I think that there was a clear level up in the level of preparation, who we know, who I know who I was able to get introductions to. But there was also just a much better understanding of the terroir, and what was going on in the local tea scene. It felt like I got clued into a lot more things that were still a bit on... we, we peeled back the curtain a little bit on our last research trip, and I feel like this time I really got to step behind the curtain and see some of the puppet mastery that goes on in Wuyi. I don't know if, I hope that's shown through on the trip report.

[00:02:20] Pat Penny: Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

I can tell that you got to do a ton more stuff. Speaking of connections and having a different level of connections, what was different this year? It's literally like a year later. How did you make so many more connections in that one year in that short span of time?

[00:02:34] Jason Cohen: Yeah. Primary contact is still someone who we met last year just being there. You and I passed

[00:02:41] Pat Penny: Talk, talking a little bit more about that.

[00:02:42] Jason Cohen: Yeah. You know, Wuyi's an interesting place and a lot of people are seriously into tea and a lot of people are very showy about being into tea. And just like anywhere, some of them are real charen tea people with real access and deep roots in a place, and some of them showed up a year ago and bought some tea and opened up a street facing shop.

So, you have to be quite careful and diligent about assessing who it is you're dealing with. But Pat and I got very, very lucky. And we met someone who turned out to be a true charen, and it was towards the end of the trip last year. So we exchanged information, we shared some tea together, and then I spent a year really developing that relationship, sharing writing, exchanging some tea samples, exchanging tasting notes. This was a, a full court press on showing that I was serious while at the same time doing my diligence on who I was dealing with. So then I wrote back and I said, you know, I'll come to Wuyi this year if, if you'll receive me. And I have other friends and other things to do there, but if you wanna spend a, a few days drinking tea and showing me some of the work that you're doing, I would love to do that. And, thankfully she said yes. And so that was really a key to serious access. And then we met with other people there. We met with our friends who do light roasting. I got new introductions to a legacy family that owns land and plots in the park that has a historical production facilities and historical familial lands. That was a very kind introduction from another tea friend.

And so just, you know, the network in a way builds itself. But in other ways it's definitely a concerted effort. And you need to be at a certain level, both in Chinese language skills and in your own tea knowledge in order to be accepted and welcomed in a group like that. So, I feel quite lucky in getting such access.

[00:04:52] Pat Penny: Yeah. And that, you know, new-ish contact that you had worked on over the last year. I saw Zongyi looked a little confused when we were talking about this person 'cause I think we, actually Zongjun, I think you did meet her, but we didn't drink tea with her until the night that you were dead.

[00:05:08] Zongjun Li: We had some other beverages before with her. I do remember that. I was overly shou at that point.

[00:05:17] Pat Penny: Maocha murdered at that point. Dying in the hotel room and Jason and I just like let's go back to our usual place. And lo and behold, the whole time, there was a charen there.

[00:05:26] Jason Cohen: Yeah.

[00:05:27] Zongjun Li: Very cool.

[00:05:29] Pat Penny: Other than connections being leveled up this time around, what do you feel like was one or two major things that were just different on this trip from our previous trip?

[00:05:38] Jason Cohen: The weather. The park wasn't closed.

[00:05:40] Pat Penny: I, I might've been hinting for that one. Yeah.

[00:05:42] Jason Cohen: Yeah. The park wasn't closed and flooding. That made a really big difference. And actually, when the park's not closed and flooding, it's possible to make some really great progress. Like you can really hike at a good clip through Huiyuan Keng or Niulan Keng or any of the, most of the great vistas and sites. They're pretty well paved and signposted. Although I will say even in Wuyi, it is ridiculously hard to find a map of anything. There will be like one tiny trail map with no details when you get to a, a trailhead.

[00:06:19] Zongjun Li: Probably on purpose.

[00:06:21] Jason Cohen: Yeah. And there is really no online maps of Wuyi. It is incredibly frustrating. But it is quite easy to get around and you know, when the park's not flooding, you can see a lot in even a pretty compressed timeframe. We pretty frequently had afternoon meetings right after lunchtime. So wake up, hike through one of the areas of the park, grab a quick bite and then go meet our contacts. So it was a pretty efficient way to do it. So that was one major difference.

The other major difference is how much time I spent outside of the scenic area. We always think of Wuyi as this one contained, what is it, 60 square kilometer National Scenic Area, but actually the Wuyi park is much, much larger than just the scenic area and there's absolutely no infrastructure for tourists or for tea travelers, tea adventures, whatever you wanna call us out there. So, you have this whole network and bus system and trail system in the scenic area, and you have none of that outside the scenic area. There's no signposts. There's nothing telling you where you are. There is a bunch of guards and gates to prevent not just foreigners, but even Chinese nationals without the right permits and permissions. And so I spent a whole lot more time outside of the scenic area in the National Ecological Protection area looking at other great growing areas of tea that are also on Danxia (丹霞) land forms that don't have quite the name cache and in some cases are somewhat purposely unnamed or less named or less promoted than the scenic area itself.

[00:07:59] Pat Penny: So you know, I think we'll talk a little bit more about outside the park and hear more of your experience about that as we go through our discussion. I definitely do want to hear about what you saw again this year that may be kind of affirmed our findings from last year, what you saw this year within the park that maybe gave you some hope.

Before we get to both of those, let's talk about verified references and why it's important to have a well stocked wine closet of like DRC and Lafite Rothschild.

[00:08:27] Jason Cohen: Domaine De La Romanee Conti is difficult even for me to purchase. Rothschild much more available.

[00:08:34] Pat Penny: No Huang Ying (黄英) to sell or trade for some DRC?

[00:08:37] Jason Cohen: I'd consider it.

Well, you know, a cake of Huang Ying goes a lot longer than a bottle of DRC. I mean, my goes to is Clos de la Roche. That's right there on the price, quality, availability scale in my book. But the thing is, and in the, in the intention of question is what does it mean to have verified references, right?

Without tasting wines like that, can you really say that you've had grand cru French wine? Can you really say that you've had God-tier wine of any type? And the answer to that in many ways is no. The ability to pull out what's nuanced and what's special is a learned skill. And it's something that takes repeat exposure to flavor and repeat pathways of mind. Just like any sport you perform as you practice, in tasting, you perform as you practice, and you're only going to perform as well as your standards and your references.

We joke about these grand cru wines, but at least in those cases there is a somewhat agreed on ranking, right? No one's out there saying oh, no, Chateau Lafite Rothschild, that wine sucks. And I'm sure there's one person out there and you don't wanna share wine with them. But generally with few exceptions, the French A.O.C. is considered to be acceptable. It's considered to be something that you can trust. Right? Everyone knows Chablis and first growth Chablis is better than cru Chablis, but that's due to weird reason. Some people would argue some early climate change and differences in soil composition and other things. But you know, with the exception of stuff like that, you at least have this ranking system that you can trust and you can verify.

With tea, there's nothing. And so a lot of people are getting yancha that's either is zhengyan (正岩), but it's lower end zhengyan, burnt to the crisp, or river tea or a 1-year-old fresh planting, fertilized summer growth and thinking that this is what the tea is supposed to taste like. Or it's something that's yancha style grown from outside the core area or even the outer area, and doesn't have these telltale signs. And so you get into this situation where people are training themselves, not just without references, but with no references. And it causes a very strange preference drift. And it causes people to miss out when they are exposed to great tea. Without being clued into what it is that makes a tea special, they're prone to miss out on the nuances that make a tea special. So I would say, if there's anything to invest in, it's having verified and trustable references. And that is much, much harder with yancha than it is with most other classes or types of tea. I would say that, we've had teachers in the past who have broken out God tier yancha in the past. But it was never something that we could ourselves have until this year really leveling up from even the stuff that I thought was pretty good. We rate on a seven point scale. Things that I was, we were giving sixes and sevens and now, that's gotten crunched down and what we have access to now is really a step up. So,

[00:12:10] Zongjun Li: We kind of feel the same way last time too, right? Like this kind of, I would say ground truth almost become a secret teaching. Like, there's no universal vocabulary or references for people to have like actual conversation with each other. It's almost like lacking a vocabulary system for people to communicate 'cause people are using basically different references that they see as truth. It might not be real yancha, but the person you know, across the table might actually think that, they had real yancha or real zhengyan, and that's what they believe in. And, that's almost everyone is living their own simulacra and they're talking over each other. It's, it's very difficult.

[00:12:56] Jason Cohen: That's certainly the case in the West. The thing that really at times bothers me is, you know, when people dismiss laocong (老丛) or dismiss the health of the environment. Things that look pretty must be healthy. You know, the idea that all of these products in disparate categories from different cultures around the world have placed value on old tree agricultural goods, right? Whether it's olives, whether it's grapes, whether it's agave cactuses, whether it's heirloom, older varieties of apples or pears or fruits, tobacco plants, right? All of these disparate, separate differently incentivized cultures and idioculture and agricultural systems have come to the same conclusion that the older trees, the older plants offer something that the younger plants don't. And older plants are always going to be in the minority for tons of various reasons, but this idea that people trained on a Western palette and what's available in the Western market and yancha are gonna come in and say, oh, well I've tried some laocong and I didn't think it was really better or worth the price premium to the xiaoshu (小树) trees. Right? That's what really gets me to go on a rant that, well, you haven't had grand cru yancha, right? You don't have any verified references. You actually haven't even had what is real laocong. Do you actually know the age of the trees or where the trees were from, or how those trees were processed? You still have fertilized laocong trees right by the main pathways. This is not one or nothing, but there's a whole system that goes into this promotion and there's this whole system of knowledge that is, particularly even more than puer, particularly in yancha, is focused on saying, hey, this is rare, this is special. This is something that you can't get again, and you should buy it from us because we're the ones who have it. And it's so very rarely true. If it was true, why would they be promoting it? Why wouldn't they sell it for double the dollar per gram, right? In China, where, you know, if you have it, you could sell it instantly. So, that gets me pretty riled up.

[00:15:16] Zongjun Li: Interesting. One thing that we did notice is how much fertilizer was used in the park area last time, and all of the plants were shooting out shoots in the middle of the summer day. And it was really, really unnatural to see how plants can behave like that. Do you see that kind of practice being used in other regions that you visit this time, like outside of the proper park control area? Because in those areas, you are not necessarily allowed to plant new trees, right? So the only way you can boost up production is by boosting up per unit production.

[00:15:53] Jason Cohen: Yeah, per unit production.

[00:15:54] Zongjun Li: You can only use the existing trees but it's not necessarily the case elsewhere. Yeah.

[00:16:00] Jason Cohen: So to the east is lower end non danxia. That's where you get like Wuyi style tea going east of Wuyi National Park. But going west, going particularly northwest, you get into some still danxia land forms around the Nine Bend River, which stretches for kilometers and kilometers before even reaching the park. And that's in the Nine Bend Stream Ecological Protection Area, which hence the name. The Ecological Protection Area has much stricter rules around what types of fertilizers and how much fertilizers and what you're allowed to plant. And then you have the National Nature Reserve, which is much higher altitude and much less tea is planted there.

So, going into the Nine Bend Stream Ecological Area, can you find places that have seriously tilled and fertilized and planted new plantations? Down by the river, you can, there's still river tea, right? Which is never gonna sell at a price premium. It's still gonna be on floodplains. But once you're outside of the river, no, the levels of agricultural intensity and fertilization is less. It's not none. You still have people who are trying to make a living off of a limited and constrained planting of tea, but you're much more likely to find individuals and entire villages that have collectively decided that they're gonna go a hundred percent non-certified organic, but organic, biodynamic, non fertilization. The ideas in many of those villages, it's much closer to what we saw in Yiwu than it is to what we see in Wuyi village, Wuyi proper.

[00:17:34] Pat Penny: So how did people, 'cause you worked, I think this time with a bunch of people who were not looking specifically at the zhengyan area tea, but looking out at these areas that we were just discussing. How do they discuss these teas or talk about these teas or market these teas even? Obviously with you, they didn't have to market. They're just talking and tasting. But how do they approach this like as a business model? 'Cause it's not zhengyan tea and that's probably easy to talk about, but they have to build this nuanced story about why this tea is worth it or better or different.

[00:18:00] Jason Cohen: Yeah, it's a good question. What happened when I was there is they would just cycle these teas onto the tasting. You know, start with a zhengyan tea and then move to a different tea and then move to a totally outside zhengyan area. And it would just be side by side, one after another in sequence. And usually the introduction to a tea like that and particularly as I started to get more and more clued into this, and having been on these trips, you guys know that I start every tasting with a hundred questions, but you know, they would generally say, this is an ecological tea or this is a natural environment tea. They would, they were pretty specific about calling out the wholesomeness of the environment and being explicit that this is not from within the zhengyan. So that, that was pretty, it wasn't something that was kept secret. It's almost an open secret amongst higher end Wuyi practitioners right now that the park is being over extracted, too much fertilizer, too many tea plants and too small of an area. Which is not to say that there's no good park tea. There certainly, there certainly is. But I think there's been a, an awakened realization about this. And maybe, this might be putting, this might be going too far, but maybe this is now like when people in Yiwu (易武) or people who like Yiwu tea are now saying, oh, well let's look in Laos, or people who like Menghai (勐海) tea, let's look in Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia. But maybe the Laos, you know, maybe that's going a step too far, but the idea that there's more there, that they don't have to follow the strict definition of lines on a map. The map is not the territory is, I think really started to take hold in at least a portion of the tea world. Cer certainly not everyone.

[00:19:51] Zongjun Li: Are there any new geographic identities slowly being formed, or have you observed any places being repetitively talked about?

[00:20:02] Jason Cohen: Yeah. Directly north of the park. Within sight of the park. Like you just see, like there's a whole, very natural area, directly north of the park. Like you can see it from the park and everyone knows that area. Everyone likes that area. That's basically considered to be true zhengyan despite being outside of a line on a map. But that, that one's held differently 'cause that one's been that way for like 15, 20 years.

[00:20:27] Zongjun Li: Huh, is it like a new zhengyan kind of a,

[00:20:31] Jason Cohen: Yeah. Like, like new zhengyan? Yeah, like zhengyan north but everyone knows that one's not hidden in secret and fun discovery. That's like, ah, okay. It's that spot.

[00:20:41] Zongjun Li: Oh yeah, that place. Interesting. So over those tasting sessions, other than, you know, your contact all the charens and maybe their friends, were there any buyers or like consumers being part of the tasting? And if so, like, what were their opinions?

[00:21:00] Jason Cohen: They had some other non-local friends who at various points had joined us. But I would say that those non-local friends were more, they took more of a role of pure student. They tended to just accept what the teacher in that case and the primary contact was saying. But there were a lot of them who were very dedicated to yancha. People who come back every year to harvest, to buy, to taste. Yeah, it was quite a nice group of people.

Outside of that when I was not with the core charen group that I know, what I mostly saw was, you know, like walking into a random coffee tea house in Wuyi. Actually, it's really fun, weird experience to go and drink coffee in Wuyi. Really high-end coffee shops in Wuyi Village tourist town directly across from the zhengyan.

[00:22:00] Zongjun Li: Boy. Really?

[00:22:01] Jason Cohen: Yeah.

[00:22:01] Pat Penny: Well, we had gone to like one place last year that was okay. I don't think we found too much great coffee. What, what did you find this year?

[00:22:09] Jason Cohen: No, I found a better one. Actually, I don't think it was the same place. Was it like a brutalist place?

[00:22:13] Pat Penny: Yeah, it was near a friend's bar and super strange.

[00:22:16] Jason Cohen: Yeah. It leveled up. And now it had great Yunnan coffee. Yeah, it was, it was pretty good.

But going, going there even places like that have tea. Right? And so of course like, okay, I order coffee. And we order a tea. So one tea, one coffee. Coffee's pretty good, a higher end Yunnan coffee. And the tea was by US standards amazing, by random whole leaf tea in China standards, if I was not in a tea place, I'd say that's not terrible. But you know, to be in Wuyi and drinking that, it was a bit charry, it was a bit crunchy. It had some well-developed Maillard reaction and caramelization going. It was sweet from the baking. These are the nicest things I could say about young tree Shui Xian burnt to a crisp.

Was it real Wuyi? I mean, I didn't get a headache from it. I didn't feel any jaw tightness. My throat didn't clench, right. I didn't sip down the whole tea, but was this good tea? No. I guess part of the question, part of the reason that I bring this up is because the idea of what is good is a difficult question even in Wuyi, even from people who are there, right?

And so I grabbed out, I have my thermos with me. I grabbed out a packet of my tea and asked for some boiling water for the thermos. And I was like, oh actually, do you have a scissor? Can you open the tea? She opens the tea, she takes a big smell of it before putting it in the thermos. And she's like, huh. Pretty good. I was like that's better.

[00:23:49] Pat Penny: Game respect game.

[00:23:50] Jason Cohen: Yeah. Game respect game. It was funny.

[00:23:52] Pat Penny: That's neither tou or shou.

[00:23:54] Jason Cohen: It's just interesting that you know that they weren't serving great tea, and yet the person behind the bar could tell that a tea that I was carrying around myself was superior. So, it's pretty difficult to have an understanding of the skill levels that's going on. I would say somewhere there was a whole big group of Europeans that went on some tea making experience in Wuyi. Then they were out drinking beer at night and you could hear them and carrying on, and it seemed like a nice enough group, right? I never, I didn't talk to 'em. I don't know what group it was. But it was also pretty clear from just who they were with, that they were being taken on a, a tea making tour and they were all gonna go home with some tea, but it wasn't going to be primo, you know, three plus dollar a gram zhengyan tea.

[00:24:52] Zongjun Li: They might be actually end up paying for that price.

[00:24:56] Jason Cohen: They might have paid $3 a gram.

[00:24:58] Pat Penny: So I, I think last year we had almost nothing but negative things to say. This time you had a much better experience and your takeaways are quite different. Where do you frame Wuyi in your relation to it now and how you see yourself approaching it as, as we go forward and potentially go back for another research trip?

[00:25:17] Jason Cohen: Yeah. We, we definitely have to go back for another research trip. Wuyi is such a hard one because so many people have such a stake in the mythology and the hyper real and the merchant myths of it.

I think something that really stood out to me and you, you started to talk about this pattern. You hinted at the question was just back to back going Yiwu to Wuyi and seeing the difference in nature, the level of difference in the natural environment and the care for the land makes it really difficult to openly approach and accept the common practices in Wuyi.

There's a real sense of the difference in just the agricultural practices. It's hard to take claims of terroir superiority seriously if they're ripping up the trees every 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, no longer than 30 years laying down young trees that are gonna start to be harvested in two years, doused with fertilizer. It's difficult to take this idea of the superior terroir seriously.

Which again, I keep going back to, it's not to say it doesn't exist. It does. It's just not available. It's just you can't buy it at almost any price, right? You have to know a guy who knows the guy. You have to have a, you know, family connection. You have to be a repeat buyer. Even if you were willing to pay two or three or five times, what someone else was willing to pay. They have other people that are willing to bid it up and they're more likely to be consistent buyers. There'd be people who have been buying from them for the last decade. Or longer and have kept up with the price increases. So why would they take tea away from them for that relationship? We have the same problem with danzhu (单株). We can't just waltz up and be like we'd like some Mengsong (勐宋) danzhu.

[00:27:16] Pat Penny: We can, but just like all the other laoban who do that, we'll end up with some random danzhu tree that might not actually be what you hope to pay for when you're paying for danzhu.

[00:27:26] Jason Cohen: Yeah, I mean, that's true, that's true. If we go to Gua Feng Zhai, we'll get a quote unquote danzhu tree. But, Mengsong? I don't think we'll get anything.

[00:27:34] Zongjun Li: Some lao paca.

[00:27:36] Pat Penny: This looks a little different. This is some crunchy leaves.

So Jason, there's on my mind at least two more things I need to ask about, and you can combine this answer, but what was the shaokao scene like this time and what's the deal with papaya?

[00:27:52] Jason Cohen: Yeah, we'll come back to papaya. Actually, before we move on to those questions, I wanted to ask you guys, 'cause I've been doing a lot of the talking, not being on this trip, reading the trip report, what was it that stood out to you? It was just a year since we were there together, and this was so different and I hope you think it was a well researched, well thought through report, but what was the takeaways that you got from it and what is different about your takeaways having been there just a year ago versus the readership? What is the readership not seeing when they haven't set foot in the zhengyan themselves?

[00:28:34] Pat Penny: Yeah. I think for me, damn, what a difference a year makes. Like, I wish I was on this research trip with you and not the last one. But, reading through this report I think gave me a lot of hope on what the Wuyi book could look like. I think after we came outta the trip last year, I was like, how, how the fuck are we gonna write a book about this? Like, how do we even continue to learn about this?

And so it, it was really good to see not only through the better connections, the access to better tea and better reference points, but I think a better understanding of kind of the ecosystem. And I don't mean that just environmentally, but the ecosystem of merchants and negotiants, right. That exists beyond just the zhengyan and, and how the broader area of this National Nature Reserve plays a part in the tea and the tea culture coming out of the Wuyi area. And so I'm really interested to continue to learn more about this like outer park in a positive way. 'Cause usually that term is used negatively right? Outer park in a positive way, I'm interested to get a chance to taste some of these teas and learn more about these.

But I think for people who have never been to Wuyi, reading hopefully last year's trip reports, and then this year's trip reports, I think we were pretty clear last year that we know that there was more to learn and we didn't quite have the exact access we want yet. And I hope that they can kind of see what that development looks like. And through listening to our discussion today too, I think just the kind of effort that needs to be put in consistently to attain these kind of networks. And how this isn't just, Pat, Jason and Zongjun show up to some tea place and suddenly have a magical trip where we learn everything you need to learn and we're enlightened and we have the best access to tea in the world. It, it doesn't happen that way. It never happens that way. Some trips are better than others, but Wuyi was a struggle last year and I'm glad to see it wasn't a struggle for you this year, and I just can't wait to see what it looks like when we go back next time.

[00:30:23] Zongjun Li: It's sometimes really feel a little bit like that in some other trips, Pat, but really not Wuyi. Wuyi feels really deep water. At least that's how I felt last time and reading this year's trip report from Jason, I actually view it a little bit more negative than you Pat in a way that it really reinforced a lot of our experience last time. Still, like all of the I would say highly intervened agricultural practices. And how soil depletion is really a thing not just inside the park, but you know, really across other regions as well. And the true good tea, the true terroir, it does exist, which is very hopeful, but not easily be able to get access to them is, is really I would say pained for us and for other people too. 'Cause, in a way it's really a indicator of a internal argument, potential, internal argument or a difficult conversation with other people in the future in a way that the knowledge that we end up learning might not be necessarily common knowledge. It's really hard to form meaningful conversation with other people in that sense because frequently you would be able to foresee that, oh, okay, this conversation is not going anywhere. 'Cause they haven't had the same experience as us would in many ways.

[00:31:49] Jason Cohen: It already happened. The trip report got picked up in a few spots and discussed, and some people were quite negative on it.

[00:31:58] Zongjun Li: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It definitely feels very different than puer and dancong and other tea regions that we have visit. And I would say the amount of capitals and attentions being paid in this area is also on a different level than our tea production region because like all of the opinions being held or being preached in Wuyi has very, very intense real world consequences. And, there are a lot of money being involved and people obviously wanted to hold very strong opinion on certain things. If they're selling tea, for example, or if they are already pay a lot of tuitions and they, they don't necessarily want to see them being challenged.

[00:32:46] Jason Cohen: Yeah, you pay $8 a gram for prime Niulan Keng and you say, no, this is the best tea.

[00:32:52] Pat Penny: Without ever stepping foot in Niulan Keng and seeing what, the agricultural processes look like there. You know, I'm not saying for the entirety of Niulan Keng, but for a lot of what I've seen. It's interesting. And I'm sure other people like vendors probably feel this way, right? They have a very different incentive than us. But being in these places and admittedly in certain areas having better context than others and better access in some places than others, but being in these places, seeing an experience, sharing it, and then seeing some people online go like, well, I don't think they know what they're talking about. Like you, feel free to rock up to Wuyi whenever you want and let me know if you have a different experience. I hope you do have a different experience than I had last year. I hope you have experience closer to what you had this year, Jason, but I doubt you will.

[00:33:36] Zongjun Li: Yeah. Sign up for a tea tour first.

[00:33:38] Pat Penny: Yeah, you'll have a great time on a tea tour. You'll learn so much totally unfiltered information.

[00:33:42] Jason Cohen: Yeah. It's a, yeah, it's a bit of good luck. I think you spend more time on some of the online tea places than I do, Pat. But

[00:33:50] Pat Penny: It's a dark world.

[00:33:52] Jason Cohen: What do you think the response is gonna be? Both Western and Chinese, right? We do have a good readership now in China. All of our charen friends out there get access to the, book and in my view, our friends in China are generally more positive than the fly by commenters in the United States.

[00:34:13] Pat Penny: Yeah, hopefully this report is further helpful context on how to mentally frame up Wuyi particularly if you never plan on going, right? If you don't think you're gonna have the chance to go to China and have the opportunity to visit Wuyi, hopefully this is just helpful context. It doesn't have to shape your buying but just have some of the things we're saying in the back of your mind that the access that you have is limited in some ways, and the education you have is limited in some ways, and hopefully we're supplementing it. But I think we know that our readership is very niche. And we know we don't always make the biggest waves with the things we put out there. I'll be happy to see all sorts of comments, however people wanna talk about it, good or bad as long as they're talking about it.

[00:34:52] Jason Cohen: Anyone who wants to spend $4 plus per gram could do themselves a favor and read 30 pages on the tea they're buying.

[00:34:58] Pat Penny: You would hope so. Maybe their time is worth more than money. I don't know.

[00:35:02] Jason Cohen: Ignorance is bliss. It's better not to know.

[00:35:05] Pat Penny: Just buy the DRC and the Lafite Rothschild.

[00:35:08] Jason Cohen: What were you gonna say, Zongjun?

[00:35:10] Zongjun Li: Oh I was going to make a maocha joke, but might be too meme. I wouldn't wish that to my worst enemy.

[00:35:18] Pat Penny: No, we saw what it did to you last year, so just know we suffer for the readers and listeners. Great benefit.

[00:35:25] Jason Cohen: Yes, we did. Have either of you been drinking yancha anytime recently?

[00:35:31] Pat Penny: Dude, like, not at all. I think the last yancha I had might have been when we were in Kunming with our merchant friend. I literally have been drinking puer nonstop. Yiwu puer, that's been like it.

[00:35:45] Zongjun Li: Yeah. Same here. Same here. Too many good puers to go through.

[00:35:51] Pat Penny: Dancong here or there, but that's about it. Some Japanese green tea. I don't know, it's been real random.

[00:35:58] Zongjun Li: How about you?

[00:36:00] Jason Cohen: Well, leading up to this trip and then on the trip but my tendency is certainly towards Yiwu, and then, if I do a more serious sequence tasting on a Saturday then what do I reach for on Sunday is dancong.

 One of the reasons that I've been doing the Talk Taste Triage that I did them thematically for the last few is to force myself to actually set up a sequence tasting of yancha because I was like, ah, it's kind of expensive. Maybe I'll just have one. But then I use different kettles and different wares for yancha. So I'm not on my tetsubin, I'm on my shadiao and soak different teapots, so it feels like a big chore.

[00:36:47] Zongjun Li: Did you discover any like good yancha that's at a more affordable price range and still good this trip?

[00:36:56] Jason Cohen: That's a good question.

[00:36:58] Zongjun Li: Because like, I feel like that's really something that is preventing people from getting into a habit of drinking yancha more often.

[00:37:06] Jason Cohen: Yeah. No, I would say everything I grabbed was very expensive. So much so that at first I thought that some of the outer, the Nine Bend Ecological Area's teas would be cheaper or at least more affordable. But they really weren't, particularly compared to similar. No. Particularly, they still came in anywhere from $1.50, the ones that I bought from $1.50 upwards of $4 per gram. And there were definitely teas that were fully handmade from unnamed areas that were priced above that that I didn't purchase.

And I think what's happened, and I talked about this a little bit in the trip report, is that particularly in these very ecologically focused areas, it's the same people often making the tea. Either they have tea makers there who are legacy tea makers, or it's the same people who's making the zhengyan tea. And when they then bring this super ecological tea from outside the zhengyan from the Nine Bend Stream Ecological Area. usually they insist on it being fully handmade, a hundred percent handmade, no machine use at all. Because it's not zhengyan, right? They need a different claim and there's not that much of the tea. It's truly in an ecological area. So some of the machines don't really totally make sense to use. It'll be too rough on the tea in a small batch. And so it winds up being fully handmade. So actually the price comes up pretty high.

But on the other hand, I think it's great. Like that type of yancha from an ecological area, totally handmade, it is like, it's wonderful. I think that pretty often hits a home run on the things that not just intellectually appeal to me, but the flavor's there. Tasting it blind, it would score above half handmade or fully machine made zhengyan nine outta ten times comparing cultivar to cultivar and maybe or maybe not laocong, but a lot of those ecological areas are laocong.

[00:39:09] Pat Penny: So I think it's important we get back to shaokao and papayas.

[00:39:13] Jason Cohen: Do we need any shaokao?

[00:39:15] Pat Penny: Good call.

[00:39:16] Jason Cohen: After our Kunming experience, which is a repeat experience for me, it's so hard to eat shaokao anywhere.

[00:39:23] Pat Penny: Yeah. Not even worth going out for it.

[00:39:25] Jason Cohen: No. And Zongjun really hyped up Xian and like no, Xian has great shaokao and has different spice and it's as good. And I got to Xian and I have to tell you, shaokao there sucked. It was

[00:39:39] Pat Penny: Zongjun made his excuses for it already in the last Yiwu wrap up.

[00:39:43] Jason Cohen: Yeah, he did. He did. They banned charcoal in the walled city and then even outside the city, you have to go somewhere the government can't see its smoke.

[00:39:51] Zongjun Li: Shaokao speakeasy.

[00:39:53] Jason Cohen: Shaokao speakeasy, what it felt like. No, I don't know. Kunming is something else. The second part of that question, papaya. That's a good question. Why did we need a two page end note about the history of the papaya?

[00:40:03] Pat Penny: I don't know if need is even the right question, but why did you want to put a two page end note about the history of papaya?

[00:40:10] Jason Cohen: I didn't want. That got added because of editorial misdirection, so maybe Zongjun can explain, but mugua (木瓜) which in more common part, go ahead. Go ahead.

[00:40:24] Zongjun Li: Oh, oh, it's actually a very old term. Really predates the contemporary interpretation of mugua or papaya nowadays by a few thousand years. And at the time it really refers to something very different, actually refers to multiple different plants across different dynasties. The definition changed. But it was really until very recently that the real papaya, the mugua that we are eating nowadays got introduced into China that people associate that term with papaya.

[00:40:57] Jason Cohen: That's the fake papaya. That's the fan mugua (番木瓜).

[00:40:59] Zongjun Li: The fan mugua, foreign papaya. The laowai papayas.

[00:41:06] Jason Cohen: You know, the thing is by no means am I a native speaker, but I put in the work and do the research. So it's, it's interesting when there's, someone's gonna read some of these older translations that I do. And its almost sad in a way, Zongjun insisted on simplified Chinese. Most of our translations are in simplified Chinese. Although this is from,

[00:41:30] Zongjun Li: It's really for SEO optimization since

[00:41:33] Jason Cohen: So everyone can find it.

[00:41:35] Zongjun Li: And also obviously, for traditional character readers, reading simplified version is easier than the other way.

[00:41:42] Jason Cohen: It is a Qing Dynasty travel log of someone who visited Wuyi. Because what trip report can be complete without comparing it to a earlier dynastic reference.

[00:41:53] Pat Penny: Yes, we always do.

[00:41:56] Jason Cohen: And it talks about a cultivar, a cultivar that I don't believe is extant anymore. I've never heard of mugua cultivar yancha, have you Zongjun?

[00:42:06] Zongjun Li: No.

[00:42:07] Jason Cohen: No. I don't think it's extant anymore, but someone tried to sell me that mugua's papaya and that should be translated as papaya. And that really bothered me after spending hours and hours and hours and hours on a research and a translation to find this travel log, tracked down the specific cultivar, cultivars that have since died out. And so I wrote a two page end note about the history of the papaya and the lexical shifts in the term mugua. And partially motivated so that I don't get any further wrong corrections and partially motivated 'cause I really like papaya fruit. Favorite fruit. It's true.

[00:42:52] Pat Penny: Well, all that, all about that papaya milk.

[00:42:56] Jason Cohen: Well, thank you everyone. That's all the time that we have for today. Thank you for joining us in this special edition of Tea Technique Editorial Conversations. Please join us for our next conversation where we will hopefully be returning to our regularly scheduled programming. We have a great chapter coming up on shipwreck Yixing wares. We'll be resuming more regular cadence and book publications. And thank you all for being along for the journey. We could be doing this amongst ourselves, but doing it with you along for the ride means a, a whole lot. So, thank you and goodnight.