Region · in Yunnan
Lincang
Lincang is the western third of Yunnan's puerh country and it carries two very different reputations at once. It is the prefecture of Bingdao, whose spring leaf reaches prices only Lao Ban Zhang matches, and it is the home of dianhong, since Fengqing county sits inside it. For most of the twentieth century it supplied raw material for other people's labels, and it only started naming itself recently.
What grows here
Sheng puerh from the Mengku area above all, where Bingdao sits, and from Daxueshan, Bangdong and Yongde. Dianhong from Fengqing, made from the same broad-leaf assamica material fully oxidised instead of sun-dried, is the prefecture's other product and by volume the larger one. Shou is made here as well, and a great deal of Lincang mao cha travels east to be pressed under names from elsewhere.
The ground
The Lancang river gives the prefecture its name and runs along its eastern edge, and the ground climbs steeply away from it. Gardens sit higher and cooler than in Xishuangbanna, and Daxueshan carries a well-known grove of old wild tea trees well above the cultivated belt. The combination growers point to is a long dry spring, strong sun and cold nights, which they credit for the thick, sweet, low-bitterness character that Mengku material is bought for.
The bushes
Mengku large-leaf is a nationally recognised assamica variety originating here, and Fengqing large-leaf is its counterpart on the black tea side, both selected out of the local seed-grown populations rather than bred from elsewhere. The old village gardens remain populations rather than clones, as everywhere in old Yunnan. The practical distinction in Lincang is less about variety than about which side of a ridge a garden sits on, since the Mengku names and their prices are village by village.
What to look for
Bingdao is the name to be careful with, and it is faked as thoroughly as Lao Ban Zhang. It refers to a small cluster of villages, only one of which is the famous one, and the amount of tea sold as Bingdao vastly exceeds what those slopes can produce, so treat an affordable one as something else. 'Mengku' is the broader and more honest label for the surrounding area. More generally, a good deal of Lincang leaf ends up in cakes marketed under Xishuangbanna names, so a Lincang-labelled cake is often the same material sold without the borrowed prestige.
How it got here
Lincang spent the state-factory decades as a supplier rather than a brand, sending mao cha to be blended into recipes pressed elsewhere, which is why its village names were unknown until the single-origin market arrived. The exception is Fengqing, where dianhong was created in 1939 after the war cut China off from its eastern black tea regions, giving the province an export product it had never had. Bingdao's rise to the top of the mao cha market belongs to the last two decades and followed the same script Xishuangbanna's villages had already run through.
Places in Lincang
Named places inside Lincang. The ones with a page of their own are links.