Place · in Lincang
Bingdao
Bingdao is a cluster of five villages in Mengku, in Shuangjiang county, and only one of them is the Bingdao anybody means. The characters now used read as ice island, but they transliterate a Dai place name rather than describe anything, and local accounts do not agree on what that name meant. Its spring leaf sits at the very top of the Yunnan market and it is faked on the scale of Lao Ban Zhang, for the same reason: one small village, a name that travelled worldwide.
What grows here
Sheng puerh only. The five villages counted as Bingdao are Bingdao Laozhai, Dijie, Nanpo, Nuowu and Bawai. All five are legitimately named, genuinely different from each other and much cheaper than the core. Laozhai is the one the price is about. Mengku, the surrounding township, is the honest label for the wider area and the one to expect on anything you can actually afford.
The ground
The five villages straddle the Nanmeng valley, which divides Mengku into an east and a west half mountain, and that split is the local terroir argument in miniature: Laozhai, Dijie and Nanpo sit on one side, Nuowu and Bawai across on the other, and the sun reaches them differently through the day. Gardens run high on steep ground with a long dry spring and cold nights. Growers credit that for the near absence of bitterness the core village is bought for, which is an attribution rather than a mechanism.
Harvest seasons
Spring, and in practice only spring. Bingdao's autumn crop exists and gets sold, but the price and the whole reputation rest on the spring picking, and core-village mao cha is contracted and weighed under supervision as it comes off the trees. A Bingdao offered with no season stated has answered the question by not answering it.
What to look for
The ladder runs Mengku, then the five villages, then Laozhai, and each rung is a different tea at a different price. Bingdao with nothing after it is the wide reading at best. What the core village actually delivers is defined by absence: very little bitterness, very little astringency, a high clean fragrance and a cooling sweetness in the throat the trade calls bingtang yun, rock sugar rhyme. A powerful bitter tea sold as Bingdao is not underpriced Bingdao, it is a different mountain. No test proves origin here, so chain of custody is the only evidence that exists.
How it got here
Local chronicles credit a Dai chieftain of Mengmeng with sending for tea seed from the Xishuangbanna mountains in the late fifteenth century and having it planted at Bingdao, which would make these gardens a deliberate plantation rather than a remnant of forest. The story is repeated everywhere and verified nowhere. It does point at something visible though: Bingdao's old trees stand in and around the village in worked garden plots rather than scattered through woodland, and they look planted, which sits oddly with the wild-forest imagery the name is sold with.
Other places in Lincang
- Fengqing
- Bangdong
- Daxueshan (Mengku)
- Mengku
- Bawai
- Bingdao Laozhai
- Dahusai
- Dijie
- Nahan
- Nanpo
- Nuowu
- Xigui
- Yun County