Region · in Yunnan
Dali
Dali is not one of Yunnan's great growing prefectures, and that is the point of it. It is where the leaf went to be pressed. Xiaguan, the town at the southern end of Erhai lake, sat on the junction of the caravan roads out of the puerh country and turned loose maocha into the compressed formats the trade north and west needed. The bowl-shaped tuocha was invented there.
What grows here
Compressed puerh above all, made from material bought in from across Yunnan rather than grown locally: tuocha, tightly pressed cakes and the mushroom and heart shapes made for the Tibetan border trade. The prefecture does have gardens of its own, in Nanjian and Weishan at the northern end of the Wuliang range and in Yongping and Yangbi, but that leaf goes into blends and is rarely sold under a village name.
The ground
Close to 2,000 m, in the corridor between the Cangshan ridge and Erhai lake, and the defining feature is wind. The gap at Xiaguan funnels it, and the wind at Xiaguan heads the list of Dali's four famous sights. Dry, breezy and high is a poor description of a tea garden and a very good one of a pressing and storage town. Dali sits with Kunming on the dry side of the storage argument: a cake kept here changes slowly and keeps its edges, and it is a different tea at ten years from the same pressing kept in Guangzhou.
How it is made here
Xiaguan presses harder than most. Its tuo and its iron-pressed cakes come out dense enough to be genuinely awkward to break, which slows ageing down and is a deliberate choice rather than a fault. The factory's material handling has also long given its teas a smoky note that drinkers either seek out or avoid, treated in the trade as house character rather than as a defect. Recipe blending is the other habit: Xiaguan works to numbered formulas rather than to single origins.
What to look for
Nothing here is a single-origin claim and none of it is sold as one. A Xiaguan tuo is a blend assembled to a recipe, and the number on the wrapper names the formula and the year it was introduced rather than the harvest, so ask separately for the production year. Keep the border-trade grades apart from the export and domestic lines: they were built for a market that boils tea with butter and salt, and they are a different product with a different buyer rather than failed puerh.
How it got here
The bowl-shaped tuocha was fixed at Xiaguan in 1902, credited to the trading houses that had set up there and to Yongchangxiang above all, and the town filled with firms working the same line. The Kangzang Tea Factory, named for the Kang and Tibetan regions it supplied, was founded in the 1940s and became the Yunnan Xiaguan Tea Factory in 1950; through the 1950s the dozens of small private firms around Dali were absorbed into it. The Tibetan trade is the through line here. Dali has been pressing tea for people who live north of it for as long as it has been pressing tea at all.
Other places in Yunnan
- Xishuangbanna
- Pu'er
- Lincang
- Dehong
- Baoshan
- Honghe
- Wenshan